Danish agriculture faces the challenge of delivering safe, high-quality, and health-promoting food as well as bio-products in an economically viable and environmentally sustainable manner. Existing plant genetic resources and current breeding methods alone are insufficient for significant improvement of important quality traits of food plants.

The strategic research initiative iKORN aims at creating a knowledge pipeline for rapid transfer of advanced marker technologies to breeding programs of high quality cereal crops. In this initiative the focus will be on wheat.

iKORN is operated through interlinked thematic work packages addressing crop quality, disease resistance, and reduced fertilizer-input production systems.