The plan to boost the breeding of pea
Posted: 07.10.2025
The Legume Generation project aims to revitalise legume breeding in Europe through six species-specific innovation communities (ICs). The Pea Innovation Community (PIC) aims to enhance pea breeding by combining scientific research with practical breeding expertise. Focusing primarily on dry peas, the PIC brings together six key partners across Europe (Figure 1) to improve traits such as yield, disease resistance, and climate resilience. Using diverse germplasm, high-throughput phenotyping, and genomic tools, the community targets challenges like soil fatigue, drought, and pathogen pressure. The programme involves multi-location field trials, controlled environment testing, and development of genomic markers to support breeding decisions. These efforts are supported by a diverse pea germplasm collection maintained at the John Innes Centre. The emphasis is placed on pre-competitive collaboration, training, and data sharing, while navigating differing EU and UK regulatory frameworks for new breeding technologies. Dissemination and exploitation efforts include workshops, publications, and breeder engagement to ensure the commercial uptake of improved varieties. The PIC also explores sustainable business models to boost the financial viability of pea breeding in Europe.
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Acknowledgement: Legume Generation (Boosting innovation in breeding for the next generation of legume crops for Europe) has received funding from the European Union through Horizon Europe under grant agreement No 101081329 and co-funding from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) from the UK government’s Horizon Europe funding guarantee. It also receives support from the governments of Switzerland and New Zealand.
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