New Project in Greece Aims to Decrypt Domestic Olive Cultivars

The first large-scale endeavor to iden­tify the genome of Greek olive cul­ti­vars is about to com­mence. The project is part of the Iconic Initiatives pro­gram super­vised by the General Secretariat of Research and Technology of Greece. The pro­gram includes actions for three vital sec­tors of the agri­cul­tural econ­omy of the coun­try — olives, honey, and grapes.

The aim is to fully decrypt and ana­lyze the genetic mate­r­ial of domes­tic olive vari­eties in order to track the genre and descent of the cul­ti­vars and pre­serve dif­fer­ent clones by doc­u­ment­ing and safe­guard­ing their struc­ture. This will hope­fully lead to branded prod­ucts with a com­pet­i­tive advan­tage com­pared to rival prod­ucts in the mar­ket.

‘Olive Routes’ is the pro­gram’s action for olives and the first of the three to begin.

A net­work of aca­d­e­mic and research insti­tutes in the field of mol­e­c­u­lar biol­ogy and genetic engi­neer­ing will be cre­ated and assigned with the task to iden­tify and record the genetic mate­r­ial of domes­tic cul­ti­vars down to a mol­e­c­u­lar level.

By employ­ing advanced sci­en­tific meth­ods, the researchers will ana­lyze the genetic code of olive trees toward achiev­ing trace­abil­ity of the cul­ti­vars and an explicit view of their spe­cial char­ac­ter­is­tics.

All recorded vari­eties will be reg­is­tered in the data­base of plant vari­eties of the European Union and new tools will be used by sci­en­tists to improve prod­ucts and bet­ter under­stand their links to human well-being and longevity.

Giorgos Chourdakis, the office man­ager of the Deputy Minister of Research and Innovation, in an inter­view with a Greek agri­cul­tural news­pa­per, stressed the impor­tance of the project in terms of mar­ket­ing and brand­ing.

“The trace­abil­ity of the descent of the vari­eties is very impor­tant because it will enable us to put a label on them use­ful for mar­ket­ing pur­poses. The plan is for every prod­uct to have a brand name,” he said.

Chourdakis then described the effects of the project from a nutri­tional point of view: ​“The spe­cial char­ac­ter­is­tics and qual­i­ties of the prod­ucts pin­pointed by the research could be printed on their pack­ages. Potentially, we could achieve a health claim for some of the prod­ucts and this will be accom­plished only by apply­ing mod­ern sci­en­tific meth­ods in the agro-food sec­tor.”

The pro­gram will aim to high­light the qual­i­ties of the com­modi­ties and cre­ate added value, pro­vid­ing at the same time a frame­work for an improved pro­duc­tion pat­tern. A bud­get of €5 mil­lion ($6 mil­lion) is avail­able for the ini­tial phase of the pro­gram that is expected to take up to two years to be com­pleted.

• Ministry of Education and Research of Greece


• Ypaithros.gr