Università Politecnica Delle Marche

The Department of Agricultural, Food and Environmental (D3A) of UPM (Marche Polytechnic University) was founded in 2012 as the new teaching and research structure combining activities of the former Faculty of Agriculture and related departments. The department consists of 54 units of senior researchers and 21 units of technical and administrative staff. Every year it runs a PhD school releasing on average ten doctors per year. In the last three years, competitive national and international programs were transferred to the department with 1.2 Mio € for Post-Doc research grants. In the same period, 185 ISI papers have been published by D3A, most of them in top scientific journals that have already resulted in about 1,000 citations. In the same period, D3A received 5 Mio € funding from regional, national, European and international programs. D3A has also signed contracts with companies of the agri-food sector for a total of 1 Mio €. The department carries out scientific research in different research areas. Among the different research areas of the department, the research group focused on the study of the effect of the genetic, physiological and cultivation factors for increasing berry adaptation and on defining berry quality, nutritional quality and nutraceutical value of berry fruit, including validation of the effect on consumer health, is highly qualified.

Main task in the project

UPM is the Coordinator of the Breeding value project and therefore will be responsible, together with Eurice, for the project management and scientific coordination. Furthermore, UPM will be actively involved in the activities of all the other work packages, including phenotyping and selecting genotypes in field trials on different strawberry categories, and providing material for genomic and nutritional analyses. UPM will also be responsible for the LCA of fruit production, the near infrared spectroscopy phenotyping, and the folic acid evaluation on genotypes deriving from the other partners’ fields. UPM will also perform nutritional and sensorial analyses on their own strawberry genotypes. UPM will provide all these data, contributing to data analysis and visualisation, and will coordinate, together with Eurice, the innovation management and dissemination activities.

Via Brecce Bianche 10
60131 Ancona
Italy

Main Contacts

Prof. Bruno Mezzetti
Prof. Bruno Mezzetti
Full professor and Project Coordinator
Prof. Franco Capocasa
Prof. Franco Capocasa
Associate Professor