September 20, 2019

 
The XVI Solanaceae Conference was held in Jerusalem, Israel in September 15-19, 2019. Over 350 researchers, students and industry representatives attended the conference. Two members of the G2P-SOL consortium, Prof. Dani Zamir and Dr. Ilan Paran were part of the conference organizing committee. The conference included 12 sessions focusing on genomics, diversity, metabolism, breeding, development, yield and nutrition.

Prof. Giovanni Giuliano presented an overview of the G2P-SOL project. To-date 35,000 accessions of tomato, potato, pepper and eggplant contributed by multiple genebanks have been genotyped and core collections were established for each of the crops. Phenotypic trials for these collections are progressing by the different partners. All data will be available to the Solanaceae community through the G2P-SOL gateway.

Prof. Jaime Prohens presented the development of eggplant introgression lines populations using wild relatives from different genepools as introgression donors and their use for breeding to tolerance to abiotic and biotic stresses. Finally, Prof. Dani Zamir together with Prof. Christian Bachem launched the SOL-CODE initiative (https://solgenomics.net/projects/solcode/) and led a discussion on the vision of the project. The  aim of SOL-CODE is to link genes to traits in the Solanaceae plants and to serve as a hub for Solanaceae biology and breeding, genetic resources and bioinformatic tools. G2P-SOL is committed to contributing to SOL-CODE with open access biological materials and bioinformatic tools.