As the AGENT project comes to a close this month, we spoke with several team members to reflect on their contributions and highlight the project’s key achievements from the past five years. They also shared insights into the challenges faced during coordination across teams, networks, and gene banks, and discussed the lasting impact the project will have on future initiatives.

AGENT Coordinator, professor Nils Stein from Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant, emphasises the importance and uniqueness of the AGENT project: “AGENT works on really innovative aspects of making genetic resources available to users, researchers and breeders. There has been no similar activity at the European level that examines the uniqueness or overlap of genetic resource collections. And AGENT goes beyond: we want to use this information to make predictions about the usefulness of genetic resources in individual connections based on the collaboration. So, I think this project has really explored new ground and it was a super interesting and exciting endeavour.”

Watch the interviews here.