Weeding the Gems

Credit: Page Schneider, Miroslav Sárička, Studio Tachtig via stock.xchng

At the Launch of the FP7 2013 Work Programmes for the KBBE and ENV themes, presentations were given by members of European Commission teams who developed the calls.

Timothy Hall presented an outline of the planned funding allocation of Theme 2: Food, Agriculture and Fisheries, and Biotechnology. The overall scope is ‘Bio-resource efficiency’, with an emphasis on the integration of basic and applied research, and transfer of knowledge to impact and innovation. They aim to fund broader, interdisciplinary topics that cover topics from more than one activity.

There are three activities in this theme, and the topics most obviously relevant to GARNet community are highlighted below:

2.1 Sustainable production, management of biological resources from land, forest and aquatic environments.

• Crop breeding and management: Legumes (€5Mx2) and small grain cereals (€5Mx2).
• Plant health: IPM in fruit crops (€6Mx1) and biocontrol in agriculture and forestry (€9x1M)
• Agro-meterological crop modelling (€2Mx1).
• Outreach, translation, impact of results: €6x1M projects to get funding to get product market-ready.

2.2 ‘Fork to farm’: Food, health and well-being

• This activity is worth checking if you work on improving water-efficiency in plants or increasing Vitamin D levels.

2.3 Biotechnology and biochemistry for sustainable non-food products and processes.

• Plant high value products (€20M for several projects).
• Emerging trends in biotechnology with the view to maintain biotechnology at the front line of innovation (€9Mx1).

Alison Imrie gave a presentation outlining Theme 6: Environment (Including Climate Change). In this theme, the emphasis is on the prediction of global changes, as well as tools and technologies for monitoring, prevention and mitigation of, and adaptation to environmental pressures and risks.

The activities are:

6.1 Coping with Climate Change

6.2 Sustainable use and management of land and sea.

6.3 Improving resource efficiency

6.4 Protecting citizens from environmental hazards

6.5 Mobilising environmental knowledge for policy, industry and society.

I haven’t gone into detail about this because it is not ideally suited to plant science. However, please give it a look if you work on or have an idea which you could develop with a consortium on detecting changes in soil, air or water; detoxifying the environment; or adapting to global change.

The Ocean of Tomorrow super-theme, which covers several themes including 2 and 6, is not obviously applicable to the plant science community. However if anyone can get marine biologists, water analysts and others on board this might be a good opportunity for plant synthetic biologists to work on biosensors or detoxifiers for marine environments.

The full calls for the themes outlined above can be found here.

Jo Frost from UK Research Office presented the Marie Curie Actions, which is the People Programme of FP7. It provides funding to encourage collaborations, international sabbaticals or career development. The Marie Curie Actions grants fund a range of opportunities, including:

• Frontier research: funding for basic grassroots research which must be cutting edge. Early career (2-7yrs from PhD) have a good success rate.
• Funding for institutions: Initial training networks, Industry Academia Partnerships and Pathways, and International Research Staff Exchange Scheme
• Funding for experienced researchers: Intra-European Fellowships, Incoming/outgoing International Fellowships, Career Integration Grants.

Peter Fletcher talked about the FP7 Research Infrastructures Programme. If you have an idea for a research infrastructure, for example networks or social databases, check out the website.

There were several talks on how to draft a good FP7 proposal. I’ve highlighted the points that were repeated in most talks in the previous post, and you can see the presentations on the Beta Technology website. Don’t forget the National Contact Points are there to help with every stage of the application process.