European Researchers Focus on Boosting Quality of Greenhouse Tomatoes
Wageningen University & Research scholars are participating in a new European Union (EU ) research initiative in which breeding companies, scientists, and growers are joining forces to increase the resilience and quality of tomato varieties.
In the new EU project known as HARNESSTOM, scientists and breeding experts are united over the next four years to develop more resilient tomatoes with better qualities.
HARNESSTOM aims to demonstrate that an increasing use of genetic resources is key for food safety and security and can lead to innovation and benefit for all stakeholders. By capitalizing on the large effort done recently in several EU-funded projects to connect phenotypes/genotypes in a large number of accessions from different germplasm banks and academia, HARNESSTOM will first collect, centralize, and normalize this wealth of information in a way that is easily searchable and displayed in a user-friendly manner adapted to different type of users.
Second, HARNESSTOM will develop four pre-breeding programs addressing the major challenges of the field:
- Introducing resistances against major emerging diseases
- Improving tomato tolerance to climate change
- Improving quality
- Increasing resilience in traditional European tomato by participatory breeding
- Increasing speed and efficiency in pre-breeding.
Learn more about the project here.
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