In June 2024, HelEx took part in a joint activity with the BOOSTER Horizon Europe project during its consortium meeting in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. Connecting with sister projects is a deliberate part of HelEx’s strategy: by clustering with other EU-funded initiatives, the project builds on shared infrastructures and avoids duplicating efforts.
HelEx coordinator Nicolas Langlade (INRAE) presented the project’s approach to climate-smart crop breeding and pollinator-friendly cropping systems, and discussed with BOOSTER partners how both projects could align on genome editing, biostimulants, environmental assessment and monitoring tools. The exchange laid the ground for joint dissemination activities, including the Hot Topics in Science webinar that HelEx and BOOSTER co-organised later in 2025.
For HelEx, this type of clustering with BOOSTER strengthens the European research ecosystem on resilient agriculture. It ensures that innovations in sunflower and other crops benefit from common frameworks, shared datasets and coherent messages to farmers, industry and policymakers across the continent.
