CEPLAS at CropIB in Amsterdam
On April 16th to 18th the International CropIB conference took place in the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam. For the 12th time the conference brought together breeding companies, academics, agri-tech providers and experts from the international agri-food community to discuss innovations and solutions for the challenges in agriculture.
CEPLAS was partner of the conference for the first time and informed interested visitors at a booth. Three CEPLAS members took part in parallel running sessions. Björn Usadel (FZJ) participated in a session about the benefits of artificial intelligence and data sciences for plant breeding and spoke about “Moving from simple genomes to poly breeding”.
The session about sustainable traits and how to implement these in commercial varieties was hosted by CEPLAS. Guido Grossmann was chair of this session. Andreas Weber defined in his presentation sustainable traits and discussed C3/ C4 mechanisms in plants. Additionally he presented PlantAct and the aims of this new initiative. “This conference is an eye opener in the agri-food and agri-tech community to push innovation and sustainable solutions for challenges in food security and climate change”, was his conclusion after the three-day conference.