Submission Form for including your FP6 project information in the EPSO online FP6 project finder

FP6 Priority: 5

Projects Acronym: Grain Legumes

Start and Ending date: 10^th Feb 2004 – 10^th Feb 2008

Budget: 14.7 M€ (as EC contribution) total ~24.8M€

Name Coordinator: Noel Ellis

Full Address: John Innes Centre, Colney, Norwich, NR4 7UH England, UK

noel.ellis –at- bbsrc.ac.uk

Full Title: New strategies to improve grain legumes for food and feed

Contract number: FOOD-CT-2004-506223

IP

The EU faces the challenge of providing high quality protein for both animal and human consumption. Europe currently imports about 70% of its plant protein yet much of this could be derived from EU grown Grain Legumes. In the human diet Grain Legumes are beneficial and they provide an excellent source of high quality plant protein for animal feed. Furthermore, legume use in arable crop rotations reduces the

need for fertiliser application and acts as a break-crop, reducing the need for pest and disease control. Together this is a unique combination of benefit to the environment.

Nevertheless, grain legumes are underused by European farmers mainly because of yield inconsistency. Additionally there has been insufficient research into the effects of legume seed composition on the quality of animal feed. The GRAIN LEGUMES Integrated Project will mobilise and integrate European scientific research on grain legumes to solving these problems, by addressing the following objectives; i) To identify optimal parameters for legumes in feed quality and safety, including GMOs while using legumes to develop healthy and sustainable agriculture. ii) To investigate variation in grain legume seed composition and the factors affecting it. iii) To develop new genetic, genomic, post-genomic and bioinformatic tools to improve and sustain grain legume seed production and quality. To achieve these objectives the project will integrate an ambitious combination of approaches, including biochemistry, plant & crop physiology, agronomy, plant genomics & breeding, and animal nutritional studies.

Particular emphasis will be placed upon the use of state-of-the-art methodologies including genomics and bioinformatics, together with transcriptomics and metabolomics.

See web site (~ 60)

Projects Web Link: www.eugrainlegumes.org

This Form was completed by – Name: Noel Ellis

Affiliation to the project: Coordinator

Submission Date of this form: 02/03/05