After holding regular online meetings to ensure progress of project activities, the EVA Lettuce network will meet for an in-person annual meeting on 24-25 May 2022 in Salsomaggiore, Italy. The agenda includes 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. Partners will also be able to visit ISI Sementi, the local host of the meeting.
The draft 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.