Plant metabolomics: META-PHOR

META-PHOR is an international plant metabolomics project co-financed by the EU and coordinated by Plant Research International (PRI).

The project is directed towards developing and exploiting the new technology of metabolomics and has a specific biological focus of nutrition and food quality. There are 22 partners in the project including 3 from outside the EU - USA (Harvest Plus), The Philippines (IRRI; International Rice Research Institute) and NARC (The National Rice Research Centre in Laos). 
 
Within the project the choice has been made to target three challenging and contrasting crops - rice, melon and broccoli. The aim is to expand our metabolomics capacity in order to get a deeper insight into the biochemical composition of the food we eat and how this is influenced by genetic and environmental factors.  
 

The rice research within META-PHOR is focused on improving the quality of fragrant rices such as Basmati and Jasmine rices and to decipher the chemical basis of their fragrance characteristics. This will lead to improved varieties and enhanced export revenues for, often poor, producing countries. This topic has been picked up by Euronews who recently filmed in Wageningen and in The Philippines.

• Expert: Robert Hall (Business Card / robert.hall@wur.nl)
• Internet: www.meta-phor.eu

Print this page