The objective of the Agricultural Genomics Transversal Programmeprogramme is to enhance the professional development of researchers in the field of plant and farm animal researchers. It aims to do so through training opportunities, both in specific research areas and in transversal, transferable skills, as well as giving access to academic and industrial networking, while they conduct projects of research excellence.

This programme is a COFUND project that receives funding from the European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie (Grant Agreement No. 945043), as well as from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the “Severo Ochoa” Centres of Excellence Programme 2019 (Project No. CEX2019-000902-S). 

The AGenT programme also counts with many partners that turn it into an international, interdisciplinary, and intersectoral programme, and also delineate the three priority lines in the program: 

• Line 1: Collaborative international projects of research excellence, working together with five plant sciences Research Centers, four European ones (Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research (MPIPZ, Germany); John Innes Center (JIC, UK); National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA, France); Umeå Plant Science Center (UPSC, Sweden); The Sainsbury Laboratory at Cambridge University (SLCU, UK)) and the Institute of Plant and Microbial Biology, Academia Sinica (IPMB, Taiwan).
• Line 2: Application of frontier technologies to plant science research and development, working together with four Severo Ochoa centers that work in other fields like advanced materials, nanosciences, and photonics. These partner centers are the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO, Barcelona); Catalan Institute of Nanosciences and Nanotechnologies (ICN2, Barcelona); Institute of Materials Science of Barcelona (ICMAB), and Center for Research in Mathematics (CRM, Barcelona). 
• Line 3: From research to products, partnering with private companies to improve technology transfer. The companies partnering with CRAG are Rijk Zwaan (RZ); Fitó Seeds; Sequentia Biotech; Vytrus Biotech; OpenNatur; and Enlighting Technologies (ET).

These priority lines are intertwined with the four stablished CRAG Programs: Plant Development and Signal Transduction; Plant Responses to Stress; Plant Metabolism and Metabolic Engineering; and Plant and Animal Genomics.

The Centre for Research in Agricultural Genomics (CRAG) is now in the evaluation phase of the applications for postdoctoral research. A total of twenty Postoctoral Researchers will be accepted in the programme, for a two-year period, which will start between May and October 2021.  

ICMAB and CRAG Collaborations

ICMAB is one of the AGENT Partners for applications in frontier technologies, the latest of our efforts for inter-center collaboration between ICMAB and CRAG, in search for better collaboration between Research Centers in the UAB Campus. As partner organization, ICMAB can receive secondments (research stays) of the Postoctoral Researchers participating in the project, to enhance their interdisplinarity and areas of application. 

ICMAB and CRAG held a joint meeting on "Nanomaterials and Plants" on July 2018, to find synergies and collaboration projects between both centers' research lines. 

One of these examples of collaboration between both centers is the "Plant Nanohealing" project between Dr. Anna Laromaine, from the Nanoparticles & Nanocomposites (NN) Group at ICMAB, and Dr. Núria Sánchez-Coll, from CRAG. Their work together focused on the development of a method for accelerating the healing of wounds in plants, through the use of a bacterial cellulose polymer, a very efficient wound healing material. Its high biocompatibility makes it extremely useful in the field of medicine and it also showed it accelerated the healing process of plants and improved the formation of cellular layers, in less than 48 hours.

More information

• AGenT Postdoctoral Programme's website
• Centre for Research in Agricultural Genomics' website