InnCoCells – Innovative high-value cosmetic products from plants and plant cells – is a four-year collaborative research and innovation project that aims to revolutionize the way cosmetic ingredients are discovered, manufactured and developed into validated cosmetic products.

For the next four years, 17 partners, representing 12 countries in Europe will be working together to develop sustainable production systems for plant-derived cosmetic ingredients.

“The main goal of the project is to develop sustainable natural cosmetic ingredients from plants using innovative production processes based on plant cell cultures and plants grown in the greenhouse, field or aeroponic facilities, as well as agricultural waste streams. Plants that are currently in danger of overharvesting will be cultivated in a sustainable and cost-effective manner to ensure that the new ingredients pose no risk to biodiversity or environmental health,” says Dr Kirsi-Marja Oksman, the coordinator of the project from the VTT (Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd)

InnCoCells is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no 101000373 with a budget of €7.9 million.

Partners are universities and research organizations, including two EPSO members VTT (FI) and Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie (VIB / BE), SMEs and one large industry partner, EPSO and one sectorial organization representing the cosmetics industry.

EPSO will coordinate and engage the stakeholder group to facilitate their advice to project partners throughout the project on the planning and implementation from their point of view to optimise project results, their uptake and impact. They will support dissemination and exploitation of project results. The SHG will be invited annually to a project meeting EPSO will also support dissemination activities such as producing videos on the project.

By the end of the project, the InnCoCells researchers hope to have addressed seven key objectives:

  • Screening a range of plant species to find at least 10 with relevant metabolic pathways (being careful to observe access and benefit sharing rules).
  • Developing an evaluation pipeline to effectively test the plants for bioactive natural products, aiming to verify the activity of at least 50 ingredients.
  • At least 20 of these will lead to optimized production processes in cell cultures or whole plants, the latter grown in the greenhouse, field or aeroponic facilities.
  • Developing additional processes from at least 10 agricultural waste streams, using a cascade approach to produce multiple extracts from the same source to maximize value.
  • The fifth and sixth objectives involve the development of sustainable pilot-scale production and purification technologies for at least 10 active ingredients, and the assembly of product safety and regulatory dossiers as well as environmental assessments.
  • Sharing the knowledge generated in the project with cosmetics industry stakeholders and end-users, to help to commercialize the ingredients and develop products that will satisfy consumer demands.

Read the full Press release to know more.

Contacts: Dr Kirsi-Marja Oksman ([email protected]) and Dr Richard Twyman ([email protected])

www.inncocells.org

https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101000373

The report concludes that ‘Agricultural support Is not providing desirable results for sustainability and human health, but repurposing it can be a game changer. It offers governments an opportunity to optimize the sue of scare public resources to transform food systems in ways that make them not only more efficient, but also more supportive of the SDGs.’

The six steps governments may follow include ‘identifying needed reforms’. ‘The time has come for greater collaboration and cooperation across government, research institutions, non-governmental organizations and the private sector to develop evidence on which successful repurposing strategies can be built. The United Nations Food Systems Summit 2021 and other subsequent forums present a momentous opportunity to spearhead action in this direction.’

To this end, the EPSO workshop on further developing the EPSO concepts can make a valuable contribution from academia. It will be held online on 26 October 2021. EPSO members are invited to register with Karin Metzlaff to participate in the workshop.

 

The four main EPSO concepts to further elaborate on are:

  1. Address Food and Nutritional Security, environmental sustainability and human health in parallel as much as possible.
  2. Improve crops towards ‘Diverse crops for diverse diets and human and resilient production’
  3. ‘Combine approaches on crop improvement, crop management and crop processing’, to enable interdisciplinary approaches with co-benefits in Europe and beyond.
  4. Policy makers should define the goals to reach but leave the pathways how to achieve this open to the stakeholders to encourage innovation and combining advantages of different approaches.

An announcement of the workshop will be sent to EPSO members end of September.

Contact us to get involved in the coming weeks : Alan Schulman, Ulrich Schurr, Ernst van den Ende and Karin Metzlaff – EPSO President, Vice-President, Treasurer, Executive Director

 

Links:

 

  • EPSO statement on the Biodiversity Draft SRIA, 29.1.2021 [link]
  • EPSO draft statement on Nutritional security, 11.5.2020 [link]
  • EPSO statement on the EU Farm to Fork strategy, 2.6.2020 [link]
  • EPSO submission to EC mission ideas call, 30.3.2018 ‘1001 crops – diverse crops for diverse diets and human health and sustainable production’ [link]

 

The CHIC project aims to develop sets of new chicory varieties to produce, on one hand, more and healthier inulin food fiber and, on the other hand, identify and produce medicinal terpenes in sufficient amounts. These varieties are developed via genome editing. Safety, socio-economic and environmental impact as well as stakeholders’ needs and concerns when implementing such new varieties are also investigated in this project.

As highlights, the first chicory plants with adaptations in the genome of both the inulin and terpene biosynthesis pathways are now growing in the greenhouses until the stage that the effect of the adaptations on the inulin and terpene accumulation can be studied in the roots. Many more plants are still being produced. Methods for testing safety aspects such as off-target mutations are in development. Bioassays with extracts from roots of wild-type chicory have detected some interesting medicinal activities, including possible leads for novel antibiotics.

The CHIC project is also evaluated on its socio-economic and environmental impact six commercialisation scenarios were defined that differ in aspects such as whether CRISPR edited chicory is regulated as GMO or not, whether it is grown in the open field or greenhouses and what type of products are isolated from them.The changes at the regulatory field has consequences for the CHIC project.

Want to know more?  Read the fifth newsletter of CHIC project and explore the explanatory videos available at https://bit.ly/2DJa2Uf

EPSO is partner in the CHIC project focusing on stakeholder engagement and supporting communication.

CHIC is a research and innovation project supported through the EU Horizon 2020 funding programme with a budget of €7.3 million

Contacts: Macarena Sanz, ID Consortium, ES – Dirk Bosch, Wageningen University, NL (Coordinator)

The report summarises the current status, goals and next steps in plants and microbiomes research. It serves the science community to further advance the field and improve collaboration. It provides recommendations as science advice to policy to the European Commission and national research and innovation funders.

There are major national initiatives going on, reported were those from Germany (by Paul Schulze-Lefert), Denmark (by Mette Haubjerg Nicolaisen) and the Netherlands (by Harro Bouwmeester). These need to be better linked and complemented by Europe-wide initiatives under Horizon Europe, for example by calls in cluster 6 and openings to be created in the Biodiversity partnership and the Soil Mission.

Recommendations focus on the following issues:

  • Diverse crops with diverse microbiomes for diverse diets for human and animal health and resilient production systems
  • Moving from correlation to causation under lab, greenhouse and field conditions
  • More understanding on the complexity of the ecosystem-plant-microbiome system is needed
  • Plant mechanisms to attract / interact with microbiota require understanding
  • Precompetitive research should address the identification of microbiome-based plant health and resilience indicators and microbiome understanding needed by the industry
  • European infrastructure recommended for plant microbiome research
  • Open access databases integrating (plant) microbiome and meta-data are required

Detailed information from the break-out discussion groups, the workshop programme and the list of participants are available in the Annex to the report.

The group agreed on specific actions regarding infrastructure and databases for the coming months. The Working Group will meet again online end January 2022 to discuss their progress on these as well as hearing highlights from (multi-)national plants and microbiomes research and innovation.

Contact us to get involved in the coming months
Angela Sessitsch, Paul Schulze-Lefert, Corné Pieterse and Karin Metzlaff

Click here to read:  The workshop report and the Annex report, 1.9.2021

Contacts:
Angela Sessitsch, Paul Schulze-Lefert, Corné Pieterse and Karin Metzlaff

The 5th European-wide seminar of the new series supported by the European Plant Science Organisation (EPSO) and aimed at the Plant Science community and its stakeholders.

TTT: The seminar will be held online each third Thursday of the month at three (CET).

On 16th September 2021 at 15:00 (CET) we will present three talks exploring “Control of Senescence”

Prof Astrid Wingler, University College Cork, Ireland
“Regulation of leaf senescence in response to carbon supply and temperature”

 

 

 

Prof Hilary Rogers, University of Cardiff, UK
“Plant organ senescence – life and death decisions”

 

 

 

Prof Stefan Jansson, Umeå University, Sweden
“Control of autumn senescence in aspen”

 

 

 

The seminars will be hosted on Zoom and last approximately 1.5 hours. Numbers will be limited to 300 attendees and therefore please register early if you would like to join. There will be ample opportunities to ask questions and join the debate. So please join us to support this new and exciting initiative for European Plant Science by following this link just prior to the start of the seminar.

EPSO members register in advance for this meeting:

https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0ucuGtqj0jHte8ItsZoKl2Cdb4hqULPoa-

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

In the coming months we will be on the lookout for talented plant scientists among the EPSO membership to present their findings and perspectives to the EPSO seminar series. If we approach you to talk, we hope you will be happy to support the initiative. This is a fantastic opportunity for both eminent world leaders and talented up-and-coming early career researchers to present their research to an international audience and to network with potential collaborators. If you wish to suggest a theme for one of the autumn seminars and / or nominate yourself or one of your colleagues to give a seminar, we most welcome your suggestions. First ideas for autumn include ‘alternative protein source for Europe’, ‘diverse crops for Europe’ and ‘future plant nutrition’. Please contact Tim George ([email protected]) to provide your name and potential talk title.

We look forward to seeing you all for the 5th EPSO seminar on the 17th June 2021

Tim George, Alan Schulman and Emily Breeze
EPSO Plant Science Seminar Series Organising Committee

Click here to read: Full EPSO news item

 

Contacts:
Tim George, Hutton / UK & EPSO Board
Alan Schulman, LUKE / FI & EPSO President
Emily Breeze, Warwick University / UK

Building on the discussions from the June meeting, the September meeting of this WG will prepare a statement on research needs, discuss potential proposals to Horizon Europe 2022 calls and prepare a statement on the new EU Forest Strategy.

The meeting intends to increase collaborations between the working group members both bi-and multi-lateral. In addition, the statements the WG will prepare will include recommendations on R&I as science advice to policy to the European Commission as well as national authorities.

The workshop will be held online 27 September 2021 from 8 am – 12 noon Brussels time.

Draft agenda: 

  1. Preparation of a statement on the need for
  • fundamental research to support high-quality applications in Horizon Europe topics and calls
  • further strengthen forests as production systems as a tool in climate change mitigation
  • inclusion of research on contingency & alternative species
  • developing advanced data bases.
  1. Analysis of Horizon Europe available information 2021-22 and beyond
  • on the ideas towards 2023-2024 calls to identify sections to provide input for, in relation with (1.)
  • on the 2022 calls published to identify topics in which a consortium could emerge from the Tree & Forest WG.
  1. Preparation of a statement on the new EU Forest Strategy.

 Administrative information

Log-in details for the online meeting will be sent to registered participants.

EPSO members: We kindly ask you to register for your participation to the workshop by 10 September by e-mail to Karin Metzlaff.

We very much look forward to your contributions and to welcoming you at the workshop.

Ivan Scotti, Berthold Heinze, Roger Hellens and Karin Metzlaff

Contacts:
Ivan Scotti (INRE / FR, chair), Berthold Heinze (BFW / AT, chair), Roger Hellens (Scion / NZ, chair) and Karin Metzlaff (EPSO Executive Director)