Pea4Ever Amorçage annual seminar: first scientific advances presented in Paris

The PeaBoost GIE held its first Pea4Ever Amorçage Annual Seminar on November 24 and 25, 2025 in Paris. This event, highlighted by a Scientific Day open to all stakeholders interested in pea improvement on the 24th, provided an opportunity to take stock of the project's first months and present the concrete advances achieved by the public-private consortium.

Concrete results and a confirmed roadmap

The Seminar brought together all partners (seed companies, technical institutes and public research) and opened its doors to the scientific community and sector stakeholders to share the first results of the Amorçage project, supported by Casdar.

The 4 board members wanted to demonstrate their commitment, despite a challenging context of declining acreage.

Scientific discussions were structured around the six work axes (Work Packages) of the program.

Key Scientific Advances

• WP1 & Yield Development: Presentation of the 2025 campaign review by Terres Inovia and in-depth discussions on work to improve pea yield development, including crop modeling.
• WP2 Collections & Diversity: Update on the development of a genetic diversity collection, its use in pre-breeding, and opportunities for synergy with other collections and panels studied by partners in other projects.
• WP3 Multi-Stress Resistance: Emphasis was placed on the resistance stacking approach (combining multiple resistances in a single line), the evaluation and measurement tools deployed in the field and under controlled conditions, and the challenges posed by the evolving complex of aerial diseases affecting winter peas.
• WP4 Climate Resilience: Flash presentations on the progress of work on frost without hardening (work program with INRAE), and feedback on the 2025 experiment on seed fragility.
• WP5 Winter Peas vs Spring Peas: Ongoing work with Improve to understand differences in food industry processing quality between winter peas and spring peas.

Breeding Tools and Knowledge Transfer

The day was also an opportunity to present the tools put in place to accelerate the work:

• Precision Phenotyping: Presentation of drone phenotyping approaches and tools for Pea4Ever trials, enabling high-throughput evaluation methods.
• Genomics: Update on the feasibility and development of genomic calibration databases.
• Communication (WP6): The Seminar marked a key milestone in results dissemination, unveiling a preview of the tools developed by the GIE to ensure visibility of the work to the entire sector as well as the general public, along with the Amorçage Project logo.

Numerous collaboration opportunities with other projects and other stakeholders were opened – on genotyping tools, genome editing, weevils, symbioses, etc.

The seminar's closing session allowed partners to adjust course for 2026 and consolidate the roadmap towards the target of a +1 t/ha yield gain for peas. The director of Terres Univia, Laurent Rosso, closed the first day by reminding us of our collective obligation to succeed.