• Successful conclusion of DISCO 01
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Successful conclusion of DISCO

Final project meeting held in Berlin

October 13, 2017

From October 2-3, 2017 the DISCO consortium came together for the project’s final meeting at the Max-Planck Harnack-House in Berlin (Germany). The Harnack House built in 1929 as a conference venue for the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, the Max Planck Society’s predecessor organisation provided a suitable setting in order to look back on the project and to summarise the achieved results.

Following the official welcome by the DISCO coordinator Prof. Paul Fraser and the local host Prof. Ralph Bock of the Max-Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology, the EC’s Policy Officer Tomasz Calikowski presented an overview and outlook of the strategy for a ‘Bioeconomy for Europe’ highlighting upcoming calls and possibilities for funding.

During the two-day meeting, the fifteen academic and industrial partner institutions involved in DISCO presented their scientific, dissemination and management results. The DISCO scientific advisor, Prof. Gerhard Sandmann congratulated the consortium on the impressive findings of the project and praised the integrative strategy and applied pipeline from discovery to application.

The DISCO partners also had the opportunity to continue their discussion on how to further exploit the results achieved during the last four years. DISCO is proud to announce, that with the release of phytoene as a commercial product from tomato for use in cosmetics, a product developed within the project is already on the market.

The DISCO consortium decided to defy the rain in autumnal Berlin and went on a walking tour following the footsteps of Nobel Prize winners and explored the milestones in the history of science at the historical research campus in Berlin-Dahlem - from nuclear fission to the early genetics.

All DISCO partners look back on a successful project, with a remarkable number of publications in renowned journals as well as commercial outputs and thank all participants as well as the wonderful host for a productive final meeting.