Working with nature to improve crops

Making plants more efficient

About Capitalise

CAPITALISE is an EU funded Horizon 2020 project. We are combining science and innovation to improve photosynthesis for higher yielding crops.

The problem

Our approach

Our solutions

Our impact

Our objectives

What do we want to achieve?

We aim to exploit natural variation in core elements of photosynthesis to identify and develop new genetic resources and support tools.

These outcomes will then be used to improve the photosynthesis of core crop plants to increase yields. Our approach will form the basis for a science and innovation roadmap to kick start a targeted plant breeding programme for Europe 2030.

The CAPITALISE project

CAPITALISE is a large, complex and highly innovative programme.

We will translate world leading state of the art work on key photosynthesis traits from laboratory proof of concept studies using model plants, towards a European crop breeding programme demonstrating more than 10% increase in crop yields.

To achieve this ambition requires several highly innovative steps to advance the scientific and industrial applications.

We will capitalise on the three most promising strategies identified in model plants to discover the genetic resources needed to improve the photosynthetic properties of crop plants.

The latest news

CAPITALISE consortium meeting success

Twenty six months from project launch, the CAPITIALISE consortium were finally successul in holding an in person meeting at La Ciotat in France. Presentations were made by experienced research leaders, post-docs and PhD students. There was lively discussion on our...

SSSA news on mapping QTL of traits related to photosynthesis efficiency

The team of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna is finalizing and testing the analytics pipeline for mapping QTL. The idea behind this pipeline is to streamline and standardize QTL mapping within CAPITALISE. The overall performance of the procedure was recently assessed by...

Training workshop 2 recording available

We are proud to announce our next online training workshop on 'Forward genetics approaches' will be held on Wednesday 27th April, starting at 10am CEST, and is now available to view. For the full program and recording click...