INTACT - The project

Truffles are esteemed edible fungi and one of the most valuable non-wood forest products that grow in symbiotic association with their host trees. They are of high economic and social value and their cultivation is of significant interest in the development of rural areas in European countries, but increasingly also in other continents. However, it has been observed a decline of wild truffle production and heterogeneity in the truffle yields in new plantations, mainly due to the lack of enough - and not scattered- knowledge about the ecology and management of the fungi. Also, issues are open on the techniques for preserving and processing truffles and ethical, economical, juridical, and normative frameworks related to truffle hunting and commercial exploitation require to be tackled through a common effort. Accordingly, this MSCA-RISE project aims at establishing a multi-lateral network of research and innovation staff active in the sustainable use of both wild and cultivated truffles, including the cultivation, pre-treatment, preservation, and processing of the truffles. Particular attention will be paid at issues related to the juridical and normative framework for traceability legislation for each country involved and to rules on collecting wild truffles in Europe. The research capacities will be strengthened through the exchange of knowledge and expertise on a shared research and training program providing stronger transnational cooperation and better connections between actors committed to research and production on the truffles value chain. The involvement of Non-Academic organizations will ease the sharing of knowledge and ideas from research to all levels of the truffle value chain. The joint Intersectoral and Interdisciplinary exchange program involves 19 Academic and Non-Academic Beneficiaries and Partners and will be performed through a series of short-(1 Month) and long (2-5 Months)-term periods of staff exchanges.

The program will run over 4 years starting from the 1^st of January 2022 until the 31^st December 2025. The planned program of secondments is extensive and involves a range of scientific activities from technical skills exchange and training to methodological development and planning of future new research. It involves more than 100 people including researcher, young researcher, administrative, manager and technical staff and will have a sizable impact above and beyond those involved in the exchanges. The seconded personnel will interact with staff at the hosting and sending organizations, beyond those directly involved in staff exchanges through meetings, seminars and through their daily work, thus multiplying the impact of the exchange programme.

Many bilateral exchanges will be made and all partners will benefit from the network that will be established, both through the formal workshops and through the continuing semi-formal and informal aspects of a continuous multidisciplinary exchange. All the Beneficiaries and Partners staff involved are in connections with large networks of players, at local, national and international level (for example European-wide for most of the MS/AC members, African-wide for Morocco, Balkan and Eastern partnership for Serbia; Latin American wide for partner organization proceeding from Argentina and Chile). Thus, each seconded person will benefit from possible contacts enlarging her/his own professional network on wider geographical and sectoral spheres. The involvement of Non-Academic organizations alongside with the academic ones will allow a bottom-up input and will help disseminating the results in the related productive and service sectors allowing researchers to acquire direct knowledge on the firms’ needs and on the other hand giving to firms’ staff a direct shortcut to the research organizations environment.

New skills will be developed as the project is crossing a variety of research. The involved research staff will learn from one another in the frame of the joint activities through, depending on the cases, laboratory and field activities, lectures, seminars, workshops, etc. Research and training will not only deal with technical/scientific disciplines but also to e.g. identifying the legal and ethical issues at the EU, international and national level relevant to the research and to the practical applications, with a view to aligning universally shared protocols. Economists, political scientists and jurists, experts from several European and non-European universities and research bodies, will closely collaborate with truffle scientists, farmers and policy makers in order to identify and discuss the legal, economic, political and bioethical issues arising from research activities. The scientific staff will receive the necessary training to face the legal and institutional problems put in evidence within the Project thus transferring to Research staff new knowledge useful for the development of their careers.

The work plan is based on 7 work-packages designed to reach the scientific, technical and training objectives of the project providing coordination of the activities, dissemination, communication and exploitation of the results. Each work-package has been endowed with a good balance of human, equipment and infrastructures resources. Each WP’s, tackles one of the major topics of the “truffle” world and provides a good combination of research, training and knowledge transfer being the planned number of secondments adequate to pursue the objectives at the WP and the task level.

INTACT’s Specific aims and Expected outcomes

The methodological approach of the INTACT project is tailored to contribute overcoming and solving some of the most concerning challenges related to truffles value chain, namely:

• Truffle species identification based on morphological and molecular methods; joint analyses of morphological traits will be performed in these species; in the same way, the most reliable/performant molecular tools will be evaluated and selected and new tools developed to improve the existing methods (if necessary) or to develop new methods for Tuber species not considered yet. (WP2)
• Production of quality mycorrhized plants; the current protocols for the production of quality mycorrhized plants will be shared among the different public research laboratories involved in the project. (WP2)
• Improvements in truffle species cultivation will be taken into account examining and aligning agronomic practices also using as host plants selected cultivars producing marketable fruits. To this purpose suitable agronomic practices aimed at maximizing truffles and fruit production will be defined. (WP3)
• Truffle natural sites preservation. In this case common and site-specific protocols for sustainable management of natural sites where truffles occur will be developed. (WP4)
• Improvements in post-harvest truffle treatment, preservation and processing technologies including the conservation of truffle-based products. Sensory and instrumental truffle aroma identification. Shared quality protocols will be agreed through collaborative work for preservation and processing technologies. (WP5)
• Advances towards a legal and political framework. Legal sources, praxis and case-law at International, European Union, and National levels will be collected, in order to study the legal and bioethical aspects concerning the commercialisation or other uses of truffles. (WP 6)