The group's research activities can be divided into three areas:

Optimizing agroecological breeding practices:

Optimizing agroecological breeding practices involves exploring the integration of variety and crop mixtures into breeding paradigms. We anticipate a boost in resource efficiency and a reduction in input costs, contributing to economic sustainability for farmers. We aim to bridge the gap between conventional breeding practices and agroecological principles, fostering the development of crops that are better adapted to diverse environmental conditions.

Developing omics-based prediction approaches of overyielding effects:

Practical challenge for selecting the best performing components in variety and crop mixtures giving that the performance of a component hinges on the intrinsic consistency of its response across various growing conditions. cutting-edge omics data and tools will be used to support an informed parental component and/or predict the overyielding effect empowering breeders and farmers to optimize crop mixtures for enhanced productivity and sustainability.

Linking quantitative genetic approaches with community-level performance

The inter-genotypic interactions can introduce complexities in predicting the performance of mixtures and understanding how they contribute to the overyielding effect is pivotal to improve breeding strategies for variety/crop mixtures. We seek to define a quantitative genetics framework to decipher the variability and the genetic architecture of overyielding effects within varieties and crop mixtures.