Opportunities for young investigators to develop independent careers are very limited in Europe, and particularly in Spain. The European Research Council (ERC) is focus to encourage high quality research in Europe through competitive funding. Moreover, the ERC offers through the ERC Starting Grants Scheme an extraordinary opportunity for young researchers to get scientific independence.
ERC Starting Grants aim to support up-and-coming research leaders who are about to establish a proper research team and to start conducting independent research in Europe. The scheme targets promising researchers who have the proven potential of becoming independent research leaders.
Dr. Pilar Prieto was awarded with an ERC Starting Grant in 2009, presenting the project “Development of super-wheat crops by introgressing agronomic traits from related wild species”. This grant is a multidisciplinary approach to exploit chromosome paring mutants (the ph1 mutants) and a wild barley Hordeum chilense (which posses desirable agronomic traits) for wheat meiosis and breeding purposes. The project is focused on the development of new wheat lines with high antioxidants content or carrying resistance to (a)biotic stresses and to unzip chromosome associations during early meiosis in cereals. It is a five years project (2010-2014) and it is being carried out at the Crop Biotechnology Lab, led by Dr. Pilar Prieto, at the Institute for Sustainable Agriculture (IAS) from the Spanish Research Council (CSIC).
