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Pro-Wild - Protect and promote Crop Wild RelativesPartnersBOKU, Austria

BOKU - University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna

Logo of the BOKU institution

The University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU), established in 1872 in Vienna, Austria, as the "k. k. Hochschule für Bodenkultur", is recognized as one of Europe's leading universities in the Life Sciences. BOKU consists of 15 research departments and currently educates approximately 11'000 students.

The university has identified six competence areas, all of which are strongly oriented towards sustainability in the management and protection of natural resources:

  1. ecosystem management & biodiversity
  2. agricultural production & food
  3. renewable raw materials & new technologies
  4. biotechnology
  5. landscape, water, habitat & infrastructure
  6. resources & social dynamics

Within these domains, BOKU promotes hypothesis-driven fundamental research and its potential application to address global challenges.

To facilitate large-scale data analyses BOKU has teamed up with other Austrian universities to establish the largest national computing infrastructure, the Vienna Scientific Cluster (VSC), and the MUSICA supercomputer cluster ranking among the top 20 most powerful computing systems worldwide.

Role in the project

The BOKU partner (Institute of Computational Biology) has the leading role regarding the work on wild relatives of beets (Beta sp.). BOKU's activities encompass whole-genome sequencing of wild beets deposited in ex situ repositories, with focus on collections of Pro-Wild partner institutions in Greece, Israel, and Germany.

The tasks at BOKU include taxonomic classification of these beets based on the sequencing data generated, as well as monitoring the composition of wild beet populations over time in collaboration with Pro-Wild scientists from Israel. Additionally, the BOKU partner will select beets with fully sequenced genomes for phenotyping, performed by Pro-Wild partners in Germany, Greece, and Italy, and will analyze the phenotypic data using advanced machine learning methods. The genes identified as associated with the studied traits will be the candidates for targeted improvement of beet cultivars to be conducted by Pro-Wild collaborators in the commercial sector.

Key persons involved

  • Dr Heinz Himmelbauer
  • Dr Juliane Dohm

Further information

Link: BOKU - Institute of Computational Biology

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