The first BELIS project Kick-Off Meeting was held on 17th and 18th October 2023 in Ancenis, France.
This meeting was a great opportunity to present the BELIS objectives and concept: enable a shared understanding of the project and its aims, as well as an effective collaboration between project partners.
The BELIS team also was able to get to know the project partners and foster interaction, establish the basis for working together, as well as present the project organisation, management and decision-making and detail the work packages, timetable and roadmap for the first year of the project.
We also had external presentations from the European Commission by Susana Gaona Saez, Policy Officer from DG AGRI, from the coordinator of the Legume Generation project (our sister Horizon Europe project on legume breeding), Donal Murphy-Bokern, and from Sandra Goritschnig (Alliance Bioversity-CIAT), the coordinator of the Eva-Network project for legume genetic resources characterisation run by CGIAR.
The KoM was the occasion for project partners to visit the facilities of the seed company Cérience, a BELIS partner that runs breeding programmes on forage legumes together with INRAE, and uses the last technologies in seed treatment.
To conclude the meeting, during the working dinner partners presented posters describing their planned activities for breeding each legume species of BELIS, and a vote for the BELIS logo was organised to select collectively the favourite option and share ideas for its improvement.
