BELIS Project

The BELIS project was represented at the 4th International and 16th National Congress of the Serbian Society of Soil Science, held under the theme «The Soil Re-Union: Science for Healthy Soils». Marjana Vasiljević from the Institute of Field and Vegetable Crops (IFVCNS) presented the project through an engaging booth presentation, joining 14 other soil science initiatives in showcasing cutting-edge research and innovation.

Fostering connections across disciplines

The Soil Re-Union provided an exceptional platform for networking and knowledge exchange, bringing together researchers from diverse regions and disciplines united by a common goal: promoting healthy soils. The event facilitated meaningful connections, the exchange of innovative ideas, and the exploration of potential synergies within the research community—perfectly aligned with BELIS’s collaborative spirit.

BELIS: Breeding European legumes for increased sustainability

During the congress, the BELIS project’s mission and achievements were highlighted, emphasising the critical role legumes play in sustainable agriculture. Both grain and forage legumes provide essential proteins for human and animal consumption while offering significant environmental benefits, particularly through symbiotic nitrogen fixation.

Addressing Europe’s legume gap

Despite their potential, legume cultivation in Europe has remained limited due to insufficient high-yielding and resilient varieties, leading to heavy reliance on imports of both legume grains and nitrogen fertilizers. BELIS is working to bridge this gap through advanced breeding methodologies and strong collaboration among research and industry stakeholders.

Project highlights

The project focuses on an impressive diversity of legume species, encompassing seven forage crops (lucerne, red clover, white clover, annual clovers, sainfoin, birdsfoot trefoil, and vetches) and seven grain crops (pea, faba bean, soybean, white lupin, lentil, chickpea, and common bean). This selection represents a major part of the diversity of legume species cultivated across Europe.

The project’s key objectives center on developing cost-effective breeding tools, improving the economic and regulatory environment for legume breeding, and ensuring efficient innovation transfer through collaborative public-private partnership platforms.

Launched in October 2023 under the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme, BELIS brings together a consortium of 34 partners from 18 countries. Coordinated by INRAE (Institut national de recherche pour l’agriculture, l’alimentation et l’environnement), the partnership includes research institutes, plant breeders, seed companies, registration offices, and advisory services.

IFVCNS’s contribution

The Institute of Field and Vegetable Crops (IFVCNS), as a National Institute of the Republic of Serbia, plays an active role in the BELIS project. The institute’s contributions span multiple areas, including developing advanced breeding tools and approaches, creating protocols for abiotic stress tolerance, and conducting phenotypic and molecular breeding proofs of concept. Additionally, IFVCNS is working on improving VCU (Value for Cultivation and Use) tests and protocols, while contributing to variety recommendations at the EU level for various legume crops.

The presentation at The Soil Re-Union underscored the vital connection between healthy soils and sustainable legume production, reinforcing BELIS’s commitment to building a robust foundation for the legume breeding community across Europe. Through continued collaboration and innovation, the project is paving the way for a more sustainable and self-sufficient European agricultural system.

The Fifth International Legume Society Conference will take place from 8 to 12 June 2026, in the city of Dubrovnik, Croatia. Following the successful conferences in Novi Sad (2013), Tróia (2016), Poznań (2019), and Granada (2023), this conference will be organised by the International Legume Society in cooperation with the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Agriculture.

A premier gathering for legume science

The ILS5 Conference will provide an opportunity to share the latest advances and innovations in the field of legumes, learn about the latest industry offerings, and network with colleagues and experts from around the world. The scientific sessions will be rich and diverse, including presentations by international legume experts in breeding and genomics, high throughput phenotyping, cropping systems, biotic and abiotic stress resistances, health and nutrition, pulse crop value chains, and more.

The conference offers an excellent opportunity to explore the exciting world of legumes in Dubrovnik, one of the most famous destinations in the Mediterranean, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in recognition of its outstanding mediaeval architecture and fortified old town.

Satellite meeting: 10th International Legume Root Diseases Workshop

The 10th International Legume Root Diseases (ILRD10) workshop will be held as a satellite meeting of the ILS5 on 8 June 2026 in Dubrovnik, following the successful ILRD9 workshop in Granada, Spain in 2023. The meeting will be organised by INRAE French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment, in cooperation with the University of Zagreb Faculty of Agriculture.

Root diseases are economically important in legumes, affecting large areas of crop production in many countries worldwide. Root rots, caused by Aphanomyces euteiches, Rhizoctonia solani, and Fusarium species, and wilts caused by several formae speciales of Fusarium oxysporum, Pythium and Phytophthora species are the most destructive soil-borne diseases of cultivated legumes such as pea, chickpea, lentil, soybean, bean, faba bean, lupin and alfalfa.

The objectives of the workshop will be to report recent advances of science on root diseases of legumes and gather the research community to stimulate networking. The scientific program will include presentations covering various disciplines and research areas in survey, occurrence and epidemiology, pathogen biology, population genetics and genomics, plant-pathogen and pathogen-soil microorganism interactions, plant genetics, genomics and breeding for resistance, and integrated disease management.

The International Legume Root Disease workshops were launched in 2002 in Rennes, France, by the initiative of scientists and professionals from France and the USA. They aim to promote the international dissemination and discussion of the most recent research results and achievements of the science on legume root diseases. Their objective is to support communication and collaboration in the scientific community and help researchers, breeders, extension services and sector stakeholders with the identification of research gaps, priorities and applications.

This event represents an exceptional opportunity to advance legume science and forge lasting connections within the global research community.

The BELIS project held its second annual meeting from 9 to 11 September at the Institute of Field and Vegetable Crops (IFVC) in Novi Sad, Serbia. The event brought together 65 participants from project teams to discuss achievements, plan upcoming activities, and explore key pathways for improvement and innovation in European legume breeding.

Launched in October 2023, BELIS aims to develop cost-effective breeding tools, improve the economic and regulatory environment for legume breeding, and ensure an efficient innovation transfer through public-private partnership efforts. The project consortium comprises 34 partners from 18 countries, including research institutes, plant breeders, seed companies, registration offices and advisory services.

Preliminary Results

BELIS is at the forefront of integrating cutting-edge technologies into legume breeding to optimise genetic progress and develop new varieties. At this annual meeting, participants presented and discussed significant preliminary results in phenotyping and genotyping. Key highlights included KASP (Kompetitive Allele Specific PCR) outcomes in chickpea—a simplified methodology for genotyping polymorphisms at specific markers—new lab and field protocols for measuring disease, pest and quality traits, and innovative use of drone imagery for phenotyping forage legumes in breeding trials. The consortium is making progress on the multi-species genotyping tool that will be ready next year and will be used for diversity studies, material characterisation and genomic selection. This tool will fill a long-standing gap on legume molecular genetic studies and breeding. Beyond breeding innovations, BELIS is committed to ensuring that genetic progress in legumes reaches farmers effectively. The project tests innovations and ideas to provide farmers with actionable insights about seed Value for Cultivation and Use (VCU). This includes adapting the criteria used for official variety testing systems,  designing multi-country official tests, as well as developing a GIS supported model for predicting alfalfa varieties suitability under the diversity of European agroclimatological contexts. During the meeting, researchers presented comparative analyses of VCU protocols across countries and showcased lucerne VCU trials conducted through a network spanning eight locations in Serbia, Italy, and France.

To better understand the organisation of seed value chain, a series of case studies were concluded at national scales in pea, faba bean, chickpea, soya and white lupin. The next step will be to ascertain the value of breeding for the users and propose ways for developing breeding programmes more tailored to their needs.

The BELIS Network

This collaborative approach underscores BELIS’s emphasis on the importance of partnership and knowledge exchange in advancing legume breeding. The project is establishing a comprehensive network that brings together public and private breeders, researchers, extension services, registration offices, and the seed, food, and feed industries. This network aims to facilitate business collaborations, deliver technical training, and advocate for supportive policies that strengthen legume breeding activities across Europe. During the following months, transfer activities as webinars and dissemination materials will be delivered and announced to network members.

Breeders, farmers, advisors, researchers, public officers and policymakers are encouraged to join the BELIS network, stay informed about the project’s progress, and contribute to shaping the future of legume breeding in Europe.

Soybean is a valuable crop worldwide but breeding programmes aiming to improve productivity still face challenges. To address this, we combined genomic prediction (in essence, asking “we know your DNA, but what do you look like?”)- with the identification of key genetic markers to better understand how genes work in relation to their environment.

By using a workflow that decomposes plant performance (BLUPs) in specific environments into two components: a genetic effect (G) and the interaction with the environment (GxE), we were able to increase the predictive ability for the interaction component compared to traditional single-component models.

We then constructed random forest–based models by selecting key genetic markers, so that these models can better account for interactions among markers and reveal which markers are most influential in specific environments. By focusing on a smaller subset of 50 uncorrelated key markers, we developed models that were simpler, easier to interpret, and more cost-effective; yet performed just as well as more complex, marker-dense models.

In the final step of our study, the performance of our models was validated using the soybean genotype set developed in the previous EU research project ‘EUCLEG’, which was phenotyped in field trials deliberately conducted at two contrasting locations: ILVO in Belgium (representing northwestern Europe) and IFVCNS in Serbia (representing southern Europe). Further validation of the models will be conducted using datasets generated in BELIS.

The results have been published in an open-access scientific journal:

Verbrigghe, N., Muylle, H., Pegard, M. et al. Disentangling soybean GxE effects in an integrated genomic prediction and machine learning-GWAS workflow. Plant Methods 21, 119 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13007-025-01434-0

Niel Verbrigghe – Plant Sciences Unit, Flanders Research Institute for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (ILVO), Melle (Belgium)

BELIS aims to adapt existing screening protocols for powdery mildew in pea to red clover and annual clovers (i.e. Crimson clover). While ILVO focusses on red clover and Cérience on Crimson clover, CSIC supports through their expertise with powdery mildew in pea.

Local powdery mildew isolates were collected on red and Crimson clover in 2024. While Cérience uses detached leaves to maintain the pathogen, ILVO maintains powdery mildew on live plants in a greenhouse. In 2024, Cérience tested several inoculation protocols in Crimson clover: detached leaves vs. plantlets and spraying vs. shaking powdery mildew spores. ILVO optimized a protocol to inoculate red clover plantlets through contact with infected inoculum plants in a greenhouse.

First experiments on sets of control varieties were promising, as the bio-tests reproduced similar degrees of resistance as expected in the field. In addition, results in both clover crops proved sufficiently repeatable, although further work is needed to optimize inoculum production and to reduce the variability of the results. In addition, ILVO is optimizing storage of powdery mildew isolates on in vitro cultures of red clover, which would remove the need to maintain mildew-infected plants continuously throughout the year. Upscaling from in vitro powdery mildew cultures to inoculum plants in the greenhouse will be experimented in 2025.

In a collaborative effort, last 9 of April members from the IFAPA (Córdoba, Spain) have visited the faba bean and chickpea field trials conducted by Agrovegetal at the «La Aceñuela» farm in Escacena del campo (Huelva, Spain). The faba bean assays are focussed in the identification and validation of markers for broomrape resistance. For this purpose, a collection of 200 faba bean lines previously genotyped by IFAPA were selected to complete the GWAS study for broomrape resistance. The materials were sown in November 2024 by Agrovegetal in naturally infested fields using two-row replicated trials with 30 seeds per row. The evaluation of broomrape resistance has started this spring and will be completed by June 2025. The outcomes will fulfil objectives in WP4 (Task 4.2) and WP5 (Task 5.2).

We also visit two chickpea assays, the first consisted in a collection of F2 lines segregating for resistance to Fusarium oxysporum, Ascochyta rabiei and flowering time that will be used to validate the SNP-KASPAR markers previously identified by IFAPA (WP4 and WP5). The second was a chickpea trial corresponding to WP7 (case 3) that will be developed further within a living lab approach in T7.6. The assay showed a high Ascochyta blight disease pressure which resulted in the mortality of most of the susceptible varieties. After the visit, we planned a living lab meeting to be held at the Cooperative Campo de Tejada next June for co-creating innovative forms of collaboration among the value chain-actors of this crop in our agroecological area.

Fascination of Plants Day social media campaign

On the occasion of Fascination of Plants Day, BELIS project and Legume Generation project have prepared a social media campaign, highlighting the importance of legumes and fascinating facts about theses crops.

Legumes play a vital role in sustainable farming practices. They enrich the soil with nitrogen, reducing the need for synthetic fertilizers and promoting soil health. Plus, they are packed with essential nutrients, making them a valuable source of protein for millions worldwide.

Let’s take a moment to appreciate the humble legumes and their contributions to food security, environmental sustainability and human nutrition.

Focusing on soybean, lupin, pea, lentil, phaseolus bean and clover, Legume Generation strives to boost innovation in breeding for the next generation of legume crops for Europe!

Focusing on 7⃣ forage crops and 7⃣ grain crop, BELIS Project aims to create the conditions for cost-efficient legume breeding and the continuous release of improved varieties tailored to farmers, consumers, and industry needs.

Stay tuned to the social networks of both projects for full details of the campaign!

As part of Work Package 4 “Genetic effects and genotyping tools in legumes”, on June 21, 2024, Bernadette Julier led a meeting with the companies Barenbrug, Cérience, DLF, and RAGT. The purpose was to evaluate the experimental capacity for phenotyping resistance to Verticillium and Ditylenchus dipsaci,  in 400 alfalfa accessions from the INRAE collection.

The plant material had already been genotyped during the previous EUCLEG project. The partners CER, DLF, and R2N scheduled phenotyping tests on the accessions between 2025 and 2027. INRAE sent seed lots and all required control varieties to each partner during the summer of 2024.

During the Teams meeting, DLF committed to conducting phenotyping for resistance to alfalfa stem nematodes (Ditylenchus dipsaci) on 100 accessions provided by INRAE.

Ditylenchus dipsaci, commonly referred to as alfalfa stem nematode or “bulb and stem nematode,” is one of the few nematode species that feed on above-ground plant parts. This nematode is present in nearly every alfalfa-growing region worldwide.

The screening experiments began in January 2025. Two tests were conducted until April, with three more scheduled for the end of 2025.

Before screening the BELIS accessions, DLF adopted the GEVES method, which differs from our internal protocol. GEVES shared its procedure with DLF for screening stem nematode resistance. Ditylenchus dipsaci larvae are obtained from GEVES prior to each inoculation.

Throughout January, several preliminary experiments were carried out to gain confidence in the new protocol. Adjustments were needed for climate conditions, pre-germination days, the number of days before inoculation, inoculum concentration, and phenotyping date.

For the screening, five control varieties are required: Europe (as the susceptible control), Daisy and Ludelis (as intermediate controls), and Mezzo and Salsa (as resistant controls).

The most critical part of the protocol involves laying the seedlings horizontally on paper and carefully rolling them in preparation for inoculation. This time- and patience-consuming step is performed by the team while listening to a variety of background music. This phase is essential for successful inoculation. Two days later, 3,000 plants are inoculated.

Phenotyping takes place 21 days after inoculation. The scoring scale is qualitative, based on the presence of “swollen” plants. Stunted plants typically show swollen nodes and shortened internodes.

For results and analysis, the percentage of swollen plants (G) is calculated for each variety.

These tests will be repeated during 2026 and 2027 as now we are starting the observation season on the field and at nurseries. Ready to see what happens next!

CIHEAM Zaragoza promotes legume biodiverstiy at COP29

CIHEAM hosts side event in the Mediterranean Pavilion at COP29, highlighting climate solutions rooted in Mediterranean food traditions

19 November 2024.- CIHEAM Zaragoza took part in the 29th Conference of the Parties (COP29), held in Baku (Azerbaijan), to address the importance of local legume varieties in achieving biodiversity and promoting market scalability in Mediterranean agriculture.

This involvement was part of a side event organised by CIHEAM Secretariat General in the Mediterranean Pavilion, an initiative dedicated to fostering dialogue on climate challenges affecting the Mediterranean region.

The event, titled “Harnessing the power of legumes: Climate solutions rooted in Mediterranean food tradition”, was held online on 19 November. It highlighted the environmental and economic benefits of legumes, emphasizing their potential to mitigate climate change and support sustainable food systems.

“Local legume varieties have been cultivated for centuries in the Mediterranean region, making them uniquely adapted to specific climatic conditions such as drought tolerance, heat resistance, and resilience to pests and diseases”, noted Joaquín Balduque, Project Manager at CIHEAM Zaragoza, during the webinar. “These characteristics make them ideal for low-input farming systems, reducing farmers’ reliance on chemical inputs and conserving natural resources, which in turn positively impacts biodiversity.”

The BELIS project: Advancing genetic progress for legume crops

The discussion further spotlighted the BELIS project, a Horizon Europe initiative in which CIHEAM Zaragoza is a key international partner. BELIS focuses on enhancing the scalability and competitiveness of Mediterranean agriculture through advancements in legume breeding.

This multi-actor consortium includes research and technical institutes, plant breeders, seed companies, and other stakeholders from 18 countries, including Mediterranean nations such as Spain, France, Italy, and Lebanon.

The aim of BELIS is to improve breeding methodologies and governance structures, and to establish conditions that ensure the efficient transfer of genetic advancements to breeders, the seed industry, farmers, and related sectors.

“In essence, BELIS creates the framework to drive significant genetic progress in legume crops, ensuring that improved varieties are readily available to meet cultivation demands”, stressed Balduque.