- The Catalan Minister for Research visits Agrotecnio for the first time and highlights its strategy for the future
- Montserrat assures the centre will help to transform and position Catalonia as one of the 50 most innovative regions in Europe
The Catalan Minister of Research and Universities, Nuria Montserrat, has visited today for the first time the facilities of the Agrotechnology Research Centre Foundation, Agrotecnio. Created in 2012, the centre is located within the agri-food, forestry and veterinary campus of the University of Lleida (UdL) and forms part of the SEARCH system of Research Centres of Catalonia.
Montserrat has met with the director José Antonio Bonet to know the main current lines of research and the perspectives of growth for 2025. The minister ratified the support of the Generalitat, a backing that will allow the work being carried out to continue: ‘Agrotecnio is a centre of international excellence, covering a wide range of disciplines in the food production chain, from agricultural sciences, the environment, animal welfare, food technology and nutrition’, she stressed.
Agrotecnio aims to develop high-impact translational research for the benefit of a wide range of stakeholders. Research at the centre draws on a wide range of expertise in agronomic and environmental sciences, animal sciences and food sciences, taking into account the WHO’s ‘One health’ concept, an integrated and unifying approach to balance and optimise the health of people, animals and the environment. Agrotecnio is made up of 15 research groups from three main areas (plant, animal and food) belonging to two Catalan universities, the UdL and the University of Barcelona (UB).
The Catalan Minister stressed that ‘the work being done at Agrotecnio is fully aligned with the transformations we want to promote. The Government wants to transform and position Catalonia as one of the 50 most innovative regions in Europe, and the research carried out in Lleida will help to achieve this goal’.
Montserrat, who has also previously visited the IRB, has not closed the door to increasing the budgets of Lleida’s research centres, ‘we ask that the budget increase be linked to a strategy or a need based on evidence. The work being done in Lleida is part of the transformations we want to promote,’ he concluded.
Visit to the Agrotecnio laboratories
During her visit, Montserrat was able to see the work being carried out by different research groups. The researcher Teresa Capell, from the Applied Plant Biotechnology group, explained how they are working on genetically editing real maize, rice and wheat crops to make them resistant to pests and drought or to make enriched food and feed that provide vitamins and even block the development of diseases.
Later, the researcher Romi Pena presented the research of the Animal Improvement group, which focuses on the development and application of molecular markers to improve the production, health and welfare of animals, especially pigs. Genomic approaches are applied at both the DNA and RNA levels to identify mutations that can help improve the accuracy of breeding programmes.
The councillor for Research and Universities also had time to talk to one of the heads of the Animal Nutrition and Environment group, Gabriel de la Fuente, who introduced her to the studies they are carrying out on intestinal microbiota and the use of in vitro techniques in mammals, ruminants and non-ruminant species. The study of the microbiota in the different intestinal systems can help to understand pathologies based on nutrition and also achieve an improvement in feed efficiency and a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
The visit ended with an introduction to the work of the New Food Processing Technologies group with Professor Robert Soliva, who explained the techniques used for non-thermal food processing (pulsed electric fields, pulsed light, cold atmospheric plasma, ultrasound) as a way of obtaining safe and nutritious food products without losing their freshness characteristics.