Strawberry is fundamental crop for Mediterranean countries, the fruits have unique flavour and precious nutritional properties and their economic value is extremely high. Growing healthy strawberry using sustainable protection solutions that preserve the fruits quality and yield, and respect human health and environment is a challenging task. In this project complementary expertise of researchers from public and private institutions from Italy, Spain, France, Morocco and Turkey are joined in the effort to develop innovative tools, protocols and strategies suited to revise the pathogen control strategies in view of innovative concepts of protection management. Here, conventional instruments (e.g. traditional breeding programs made with local germplasm) are integrated with New Breeding Techniques (NBT) able to develop new plants and products that counteract the most aggressive pathogens and the new phytosanitary emergences. The Med-Berry project aims are 4: 1: Resistant genes identification and exploitation. Local resistant germplasm will be used to develop resistant varieties against fungal diseases 2: Development of NBT protocols, and RNA interference molecules. Intragenesis protocols will be applied to study the role of key strawberry defense genes to increase fruit resistance. Specific dsRNA molecules will be designed to target pathogen key genes by topical application on plants (SIGS). 3. Socio-economic impact analysis. The economic sustainability of the developed solutions and their social acceptability across the Mediterranean countries will be evaluated to obtain realistic measure of the potential application of the new strategies. 4. Dissemination. Large effort will be put to disseminate results in different farming and industrial contexts and to share the newly achieved knowledge through the strawberry research network and the organization of training activities.

The main objective of GoodBerry is to provide the necessary knowledge and procedures to facilitate the development of highly productive and top quality berry fruits, even under multiple suboptimal growth conditions, at a competitive cost. The project is based on an integrative multi-actor approach, from cultivation techniques to molecular studies, aiming the development and validation of a range of tools to improve competitiveness of European berry production, and eventually the attraction and confidence of consumers. The selection of the model species can be considered as strategic since strawberry is the most important berry crop in Europe and the production of raspberry and blackcurrant are increasing strongly in recent years. The project will apply the most recent technical advances in: a) The identification of berry germplasm exhibiting advantageous balance of production vs nutritional quality throughout the EU, b) The search of innovative production systems to maintain high yield in a range of European-wide environments, c) The development of standardized and reliable analytical tools to evaluate berry production and fruit quality. As result, it is expected: a) the implementation of modern breeding strategies to accelerate the release of new berry cultivars; b) The adoption by EU-growers of high quality production systems to improve fruit quality. The proposal establishes as obligatory to disseminate and communicate the results to the scientific community, industry, the broad public and interested stakeholders user. The final impact will be to consolidate the emerging needs of high-quality berries, and to boost consumer and market confidence supported by an improved competitiveness of producers. It is a multidisciplinary, collaborative project based on complementary expertise and skills of internationally recognized berry research institutions, and highly involved key berry SMEs that will combine their effort to secure the robustness of the results.