INRAE

Kick-off meeting of the AgroDiv and BReIF projects of the PEPR Agroecology and Digital, combining the plant and animal pillars of RARe.

The kick-off meeting for the AgroDiv "Genomic and functional characterization of plant and animal diversity" and BReIF "An e-Infrastructure to accelerate the use of biological resources" projects took place on March 22 and 23, on the Cézeaux campus in Clermont-Ferrand. These projects are funded under the Priority Research Program and Equipment (PEPR) Agroecology and Digital (PIA4).

The Agroecology and Digital PEPR is co-directed by INRAE and Inria. Announced by the government in November 2021, endowed with 65 million euros over 8 years, it concerns data, agroequipment but also genetic resources at the service of agro-ecological transition and adaptation to climatic hazards. Three topics are prioritized: data generation technologies for characterizing animal and plant genetic resources, and digital methods for exploiting data in agriculture; new generations of agri-equipment such as robotization; and trajectories towards socio-ecosystems open to digital innovations.
The BreIF (Biological Resources Information Facility) project aims to set up an e-infrastructure to accelerate the use of diversified biological resources. The available resources are hosted by the RARe infrastructure. This project brings together two national infrastructures:
- The Institut Français de Bioinformatique (French node of the European ELIXIR infrastructure) and its INRAE component called BioinfOmics; IFB is a federated computing and storage infrastructure for the research community.
- And the RARe infrastructure for associated agronomic biological resources.
Data integration for RARe's CRBs is a strategic challenge for access to biological resources, facilitating the automatic exchange of (meta)data between RARe's information systems and those of other infrasctructures involved in characterizing biological resources (France Génomique, Liph@SAS).

The AgroDiv project will use and develop cutting-edge genomics and genetics approaches to characterize biological material in detail, from gene to species, and assess its potential value. To achieve this objective, some 20,000 and 7,500 selected accessions from several botanical families and animal species will be studied. This will lead to the construction of pangenomes, the development and deployment of associated methods, intensive data mining and genetic diversity characterization tools, and the massive identification of variants of interest for agroecology. The aim of this project is to generate knowledge that will be distributed as widely as possible to the scientific community, in line with the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles, to ensure the sustainability of this research.
These two ambitious projects will contribute to enhancing the value of omics data in the service of agroecology and beyond, for the understanding of living organisms.

Contact :

  • Michèle Tixier-Boichard
  • Anne-Françoise Adam-Blondon

Modification date: 27 October 2023 | Publication date: 08 June 2023 | By: RARe - Edition P. Huan