BIOCRAFT

Climate change, soil degradation, resource depletion, and geopolitical instability underscore the urgent need to reinforce the resilience of EU crops. Agricultural productivity and nutritional quality are increasingly constrained by multifactorial abiotic and biotic stresses that conventional breeding can no longer address effectively. BIOCRAFT will tackle these intertwined challenges by pioneering disruptive biotechnological solutions to deliver next-generation resilient, high-yielding and resource-efficient potato and rice elite lines with enhanced native nutritional quality and valuable non-native ingredients for industrial biomanufacturing. BIOCRAFT will target drought, heat and late blight resilience in potato as well as drought, salinity and blast resilience in rice, addressing the major abiotic and biotic constraints threatening yield stability, food security and industrial competitiveness for these two crops in Europe. Using a blueprint approach based on multiplex breeding technologies and AI-driven phenotyping coupled to multi-omics decisional paths and in-depth studies of soil microbiome–plant interactions in a single breeding pipeline, BIOCRAFT will achieve climate-smart elite lines validated at TRL4, ready for rapid adoption by breeders and industrial stakeholders. BIOCRAFT is a multidisciplinary consortium of nine partners comprising leading RTOs, universities, industrial stakeholders and technology partners with expertise in plant biotechnology, AI-based phenotyping, molecular breeding, microbiome research, seed production and commercialization, environmental risk assessment, regulatory compliance, socio-economic analysis and alignment policy. By reinforcing Europe’s capacity to generate staple crops that tolerate combined abiotic and biotic stresses, BIOCRAFT will simultaneously promote food and nutritional security as well as sustainable biobased production to increase the diversification and resilience of Europe’s food supply chain in the future.