Objectives

Overall objective

META-PHOR brings together key European players with proven track-records in plant metabolic profiling, analytical chemistry, plant biology and human nutrition, in a focused, coordinated initiative to develop a high throughput metabolite-based phenotyping platform appropriate for the targeted improvement of plant breeding, engineering and processing strategies aimed at a more varied range of food products with enhanced nutritional quality.

Specific Strategic Research Objectives

META-PHOR focuses on the following strategic objectives:

To create an integrated, multidisciplinary European-based phenotyping platform with initial focus on the nutrition and health-related components and with a broad applicability·

To create a European consortium to enhance further the collaboration between research groups with an existing dedication to the development and application of novel innovative, high throughput metabolite profiling tools for plants.

To provide a means for direct intense interaction between biologists, nutritionists and technologists working on nutrition-related, quality aspects of European food crops to design dedicated biological / bioinformatics tools appropriate for knowledge generation and decision management systems.

To generate knowledge on nutrition, health and quality-related metabolites present in 3 important European crops: broccoli, melon and rice and enhance our understanding on how this is influenced by physiology, genetics and environment.

To incorporate and combine these activities with those of appropriate INCO partners and European SME’s which could greatly benefit from having access to such a platform in their own applied research programmes.

To establish an extensive outreach programme aimed at both science and society which shall enhance open access to the tools, information and knowledge generated.