Support of plant phenotyping research in Germany

Within the framework of the infrastructure project "DPPN" (2013 - 2018/2021, FKZ: 031A053), the BMBF has provided more than 37 million EUR for the user-oriented development and implementation of innovative facilities for plant phenotyping at the Research Center Jülich (FZJ), the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK) in Gatersleben and the Helmholtz Zentrum München (HMGU) in Germany. Thus, the DPPN project makes a decisive contribution to reducing a major "bottleneck" for modern plant breeding and plant research in Germany.

With the completion of the DPPN project, a comprehensive portfolio of new and innovative methods and facilities with high quality and increased throughputs is now available for users with plant phenotypic questions.

In 2018, the three DPPN project partners founded the DPPN e.V. association, in particular to support and ensure the long-term provision of facilities for conducting excellent research on plant optimization and breeding beyond the duration of the DPPN project. With the three original DPPN sites as members, the DPPN e.V. provides the framework for a concerted, long-term and demand-oriented provision of the facilities beyond the DPPN project duration and ensures, in the sense of the association's purposes, that plant phenotyping in Germany is promoted sustainably and intensively through the use of these facilities.

This requires that these facilities can be made available to all relevant German users - as cost-effectively as possible. This also includes facilities that were already available at the sites prior to the DPPN project and those that were established from other sources during the DPPN project period, and those that will be realized in the future.

Since European users have already been able to receive project funding through transnational access to these facilities under EPPN2020, German users were not be able to access German facilities (and thus not to DPPN facilities). Thus, national funding for users from Germany is essential in order to avoid a competitive disadvantage for German science.

In order to make the facilities available to these users, the DPPN e.V. is trying to obtain corresponding project funds.