EVA Lettuce Project Meeting

The EVA Lettuce project meeting was held from 31 August to 1 September 2023 in Wageningen, the Netherlands, co-hosted by the Centre of Genetic Resources of the Netherlands (CGN). The meeting was held right after the Eucarpia Leafy Vegetables Conference, which provided an opportunity to showcase the work of EVA Lettuce and to discuss future collaborations. The new SPET genotyping panel for lettuce developed by the EVA Lettuce team together with IGATech was recently published in Frontiers in Plant Science (https://doi.org/10.3389/fpls.2023.1252777)  and presented during the conference orally and as a poster, sparking interest from the lettuce research community. During the EVA meeting, network partners discussed additional work planned for the remainder of the current project, to make the best use of the existing datasets and genotyping information of the EVA lettuce collection and also brainstormed about potential topics and approaches for a future EVA Lettuce 2.0, which also looks to involve new partners who can bring additional germplasm from other European regions and expertise and evaluation capacity to the consortium. The meeting finished with a visit to the facilities of CGN and the Netherlands Plant Eco-phenotyping Centre (NPEC) at Wageningen University and Research.

The meeting report is available [here].

After holding regular online meetings to ensure progress of project activities, 13 partners of the EVA Lettuce network finally met in person for a project meeting on 24-25 May 2022 in Salsomaggiore Terme, Italy. Using a hybrid format, five colleagues who could not attend in person connected remotely to the meeting. The agenda covered topics related to management and analysis of data generated in phenotypic trials and genotyping as well as discussions on future plans of the network to continue their collaboration. Over the past two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, the project has made great progress and generated interesting phenotypic data in field and lab trials. In addition, a novel genotyping panel using Single Primer Enhancement Technology (SPET) was developed by the network and may be useful for other lettuce researchers. The meeting ended with a visit to the headquarters of ISI Sementi, the local host of the meeting, in nearby Fidenza. Overall, network partners were satisfied with the work done in the network so far and are looking forward to continuing their collaboration on lettuce evaluations.
The meeting was also reported on in Italian editions of horticultural newsletters Fresh Plaza and Fresh Cut.

The meeting report is available [here].

The agenda can be viewed [here (102,2 KB)].

The first virtual meeting to substitute for an in-person project meeting originally planned in Salsomaggiore, Italy, was held on 30 March 2020 on MS Teams. Sixteen project partners joined the online meeting and contributed to animated discussions on how to advance the EVA Lettuce project. Massimiliano Beretta (ISI Sementi, Italy), who volunteered to help leading the lettuce consortium, proposed several adjustments to the original project proposal, to streamline the experiment and create valuable data for the network partners. Two breeding companies agreed to evaluating Bremia resistance on 50 accessions in duplicate laboratory tests. Discussions on traits for field evaluations of up to 150 lettuce accessions were not finalized and will continue within the project team.
Despite the limitations of having these important discussions online instead of face-to-face the EVA Lettuce network partners agreed that using technologies as much as possible will facilitate the network interactions also going forward.

• Meeting report (97,0 KB)
• Presentations given during the meeting