Sensors and daTA tRaininG towards high-performance Agri-food sysTEms

STARGATE will enable UCP to become an established centre of excellence on the use of sensors, multi-omics and plant phenotyping technologies as tools to gain a deeper understanding on the management of desired traits that enable sustainable and resilient agri-food systems. For this, it is essential that UCP increases its competencies in data management and data analysis. STARGATE will boost the level of excellence of UCP in a topic of extreme relevance to the centre's core activities within its three pillars of research: Environment and Resources; Food and Nutrition; Biobased and Biomedical Products. The project will establish a framework upon which the Consortium will build to understand the potential impact of genetic resources and biodiversity on the final food, and to modulate plant phenotypes aiming to select the best raw material to generate the Premium food product (nutritious, healthy, safe and sustainable) by increasing resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses, reduce the use of fertilizers/herbicides, improve nutritional value of crops and overall quality, extend shelf-life and reduce losses. STARGATE will facilitate structural changes at UCP and maximize its high potential for research excellence by creating a synergic research environment with internationally leading institution in this area: INRAE, IPK and WR. These partners cover gap areas of UCP (sensing technologies, multi-omics, phenotyping, data analysis, predictive modelling). These centres have the infrastructure as well as the capacity to manage and analyse data generated by phenomics, metabolomics, diverse sensor data, and build predictive models for selected scenarios, being ideal to support UCP in acquiring such knowledge at international excellence levels. In the long term, STARGATE will enable UCP to expand these tools to other stages of the agri-food system and to develop a centre of excellence in high-performance agri-food systems.