Michele Morgante has been granted with a 2.5 million Euros by the European Research Council for a project entitled NOVABREED: "Novel variation in plant breeding and the plant pan-genomes".
The competition was among European advanced investigators. In four years of activity the ERC financed 78 grants to Italian scientists and this is the second project granted to a scientists of the University of Udine. Aims of the project are:
- defining extent and composition of the pan genome in two plant species, maize and grapevine;
- identifying the different mechanisms that generate and maintain the dispensable portion in these 2 species;
- identifying the phenotypic effects of the dispensable genome;
- estimating the rates and modes of creation of new genetic variation due to dispensable genome components and whether this could represent an important factor in the breeding process.
Michele Morgante will manage its project at the University of Udine where he has a permanent position of full professor of Genetics and will operate at the IGA where an Illumina platform of Next Generation Sequencing based an GAII and HiSeq2000 machines is available.
