The ISIDORe consortium, made of the capacities of European ESFRI infrastructures and coordinated networks, proposes to assemble the largest and most diverse research and service providing instrument to study infectious diseases in Europe, from structural biology to clinical trials. Giving scientists access to the whole extent of our state of the art facilities, cutting edge services, advanced equipment and expertise, in an integrated way and with a common goal, will enable or accelerate the generation of new knowledge and intervention tools to ultimately help control SARS CoV 2 in particular, and epidemic prone pathogens in general, while avoiding fragmentation and duplication among European initiatives. Such a global and interdisciplinary approach is meant to allow the implementation of user projects that are larger, more ambitious and more impactful than the EU supported transnational activities that the consortium is used to run. Our proposition is ambitious but achievable in a timely fashion due to the relevance and previous experience of the partners that we have gathered and that have complementary fields of expertise, which addresses the need for an interdisciplinary effort. Leveraging all these existing strengths to develop synergies will create an additional value and enhance Europe capacity for controlling emerging or re emerging and epidemic infectious diseases, starting with the COVID 19 pandemic. Such a global and coordinated approach is consistent with the recommendations of the One Health concept and necessary to make significant contributions to solving complex societal problems like epidemics and pandemics.

Root2Res will deliver a package of solutions to enhance the resilience of rotational cropping system by considering relevant root traits with respect to the impact of climate change. Innovations will include phenotyping, genetic and modelling tools that will help breeders evaluate, in field and controlled conditions, novel and existing genotypes of a range of crops (Cereals, Potatoes, Legumes) as root ideotypes for different soil and climatic environments across Europe. Root2Res will also investigate the potential role of emerging crops (Sweet potato, Lentil) to enhance resilience to environmental change, by assessing their genotypic and phenotypic variation. The environments targeted include those predicted to suffer from the largest impact of climate change on yield in Europe. Resilience to stress will focus on greater variation in water availability (both drought and waterlogging) and interactions with other stresses (temperature, reduced nutrient availability). We will also consider the impact of novel understanding of the plasticity of traits to stress. Traits to be assessed will focus on exploration, exploitation and rhizosphere microbiome related traits integrated in an extended phenotype. The impacts of the more resilient ideotypes designed in Root2Res on the delivery of climate change mitigation outcomes (soil carbon sequestration, nutrient utilisation and greenhouse gas emission) will be assessed in field. Root2Res will integrate a strong interaction with stakeholders all through the project, particularly breeders and farmers. The ambition of Root2Res is to deliver crops adapted to changing environments and able to mitigate climate change, by utilising existing genetic diversity for breeding programs in a range of crop species essential to cropping systems and then widening understanding to crops suitable for resilient future systems. This ambition will be supported by the joined commitment of a multidisciplinary partnerships across Europe and beyond.

The general objective of LEAP4FNSSA is to establish a sustainable structure, or ‘Platform’, for the efficient and coherent implementation of the AU-EU Research and Innovation Partnership as described in the FNSSA Roadmap. Under the aegis of the HLPD and its Bureau, and by building upon related projects such as RINEA, CAAST-Net. Plus, ProIntensAfrica and LEAP-Agri, LEAP4FNSSA aims to achieve this overall objective through three specific objectives: - Increase the synergies and coherence between actors, research and innovation projects, initiatives and programmes, through the development of institutional alliances and clusters of projects; - Develop a learning environment and a large knowledge base, including monitoring and evaluation activities, creating communication and links between different initiatives to improve STI cooperation; - Establish a long term and sustainable governance and funding mechanism for the Platform. To reach these objectives, LEAP4FNSSA will build on a large consortium of experienc

The overall objective will be to create and mobilise an International network of high calibre centres around a strong European group of institutes selected for their appropriate expertises, to collect, amplify, characterise, standardise, authenticate, distribute and track, mammalian and other exotic viruses. The network of EVAg laboratories including 25 institutions represents an extensive range of virological disciplines. The architecture of the consortium is based on the association of capacities accessible to the partners but also to any end-users through the EVAg web-based catalogue. This concept has been elaborated and tested for its efficiency during the successful EVA project (FP7). The project will integrate more facilities dedicated to high risk pathogen (HRP) manipulation (1 in EVA, 13 in EVAg) The access to products derived from those HRP will be enhanced and for instance the production of diagnostic reagents will be facilitated. The new project will also provide access to high containment biosafety facilities to carry out in vivo studies of infectious disease using natural or models hosts, to look at prophylactic or therapeutic control measures and to develop materials for the evaluation of diagnostic tests, meaning an extensive capacity to service and to training. EVAg will also link up with other network-based virus-associated programmes that exist globally. However, looking further ahead, EVAg is conceived ultimately to be an open entity aiming at developing synergies and complementarity capabilities in such a way as to offer an improved access to researchers. This project will generate the largest collection of mammalian viruses in the world and move beyond the current state-of-the-art to provide an increasingly valuable resource and service to the world’s scientific community, including government health departments, higher education institutes, industry and, through information systems, the general public.