The world demographic growth and global climate change are major challenges for human society,hence the need to design new strategies for maintaining high crop yield in unprecedented environmental conditions.The objective of TomGEM is to design new strategies aiming to maintain high yields of fruit and vegetables at harsh temperature conditions, using tomato as a reference fleshy fruit crop.As yield is a complex trait depending on successful completion of different steps of reproductive organ development, including flower differentiation and efficient flower fertilization,TomGEM will use trans-disciplinary approaches to investigate the impact of high temperature on these developmental processes.The core of the project deals with mining and phenotyping a vast range of genetic resources to identify cultivars/genotypes displaying yield stability and to uncover loci/genes controlling flower initiation,pollen fertility and fruit set.Moreover,since high yield and elevated temperatures can be detrimental to quality traits,TomGEM will also tackle the fruit quality issue.The goal is to provide new targets and novel strategies to foster breeding of new tomato cultivars with improved yield.The main strength of TomGEM resides in the use of unique and unexplored genetic resources available to members of the consortium.It gathers expert academic researchers and private actors committed to implement a multi-actor approach based on demand driven innovation.Tomato producers and breeders are strongly involved from design to implementation of the project and until the dissemination of results.TomGEM will provide new targets and novel strategies to foster the breeding of new tomato cultivars with improved yield under suboptimal temperature conditions.TomGEM will translate scientific insights into practical strategies for better handling of interactions between genotype,environment and management to offer holistic solutions to the challenge of increasing food quality and productivity.

Speech production is one of the most fundamental of human abilities and its breakdown can have devastating consequences for individuals. Despite this, there is no comprehensive theory of the cognitive and articulatory processes involved in normal speech production or of the diverse ways in which these processes may be impaired through abnormal development or brain injury. One difficulty in formulating such a theory is that the two broad levels of processing underlying speech production have typically been treated within two distinct disciplines. On one side, cognitive psychologists have used one set of methods to study the processes through which we compute an abstract code for the sounds that we intend to produce. On the other side, phoneticians have used another set of methods to study how we translate this abstract code into the articulatory movements that produce an acoustic signal. Our research project brings these disciplines together in pursuit of a more complete theory of speech production than has so far been developed. The specific aim of our research project is to determine how information flows across these two broad levels of processing in speech production. Speech production researchers have generally made an assumption that the relationship between these levels of processing is 'staged'. Essentially, this means that they have assumed that an abstract code for sound must be computed fully before the motor system can begin to compute the programs associated with appropriate articulatory movement. The view that these two broad levels of processing are accomplished in discrete stages has allowed researchers to them as largely separate problems. However, this fundamental assumption about how the speech production system operates has never been tested in a concentrated manner, and in fact has been challenged by recent findings. Our research will test this core assumption thoroughly, in a series of several experiments that use an innovative interdisciplinary method recently developed in our laboratory. This method quantifies highly-specific influences of ignored distractor syllables (e.g., KEY) on the articulation of target syllables (e.g., CORE) using fine-grained articulatory and acoustic techniques imported from experimental phonetics. Our research will ask whether, and under which experimental circumstances, visual and auditory distractor syllables leave systematic 'traces' of themselves on the otherwise accurate production of target syllables. Such traces would indicate that motor programs are computed automatically for the ignored distractor syllables, and compete with the motor programs associated with the articulation of target syllables. These findings would challenge the staged model of speech production assumed by most researchers in the field, since on that model information about distractors not selected for production cannot be passed to the motor systems involved in articulation. The findings of this research project may therefore have major theoretical implications for our understanding of the processes underlying speech production. It is also expected that the innovative method advanced in this project will advance the range of tools available for the scientific study of normal and impaired speech production.

The proposal presented here is important for quantifying how interfacial chemistry in the atmosphere is important in the assessment of modern climate change. It relies on three aspects of atmospheric science 1) Atmospheric aerosols are tiny solid or liquid particles suspended in air. They arise from human activity (e.g. burning of fossil fuels) and naturally (e.g. breaking ocean waves) and can exist in the atmosphere for minutes to days. These aerosol are a large source of uncertainty when assessing man-made contributions to climate change as they strongly influence (I) the amount of light reflected back to space (potentially cooling the planet) and (II) the formation of clouds, and how much sunlight they reflect back to space (again, potentially cooling the planet). 2) Some of these aerosol have thin films or coatings of organic material. As the size of these aerosol are similar to the wavelength of sunlight a thin coating can significantly alter their ability to scatter and 'reflect' sunlight and their potential to form clouds. 3) The atmosphere effectively acts as a low temperature, dilute fuel, combustion system oxidizing chemicals released from the Earth's surface. The rate at which chemicals released from the Earth's surface can be removed by oxidation is important in understanding the atmosphere's self-cleansing mechanism. Previously *proxies* of thin films on atmospheric aerosol have been shown to potentially alter the light scattering and cloud forming ability of clouds. These proxies have been chosen from a chemical catalogue and do not represent the mixture and variety found in the atmosphere. We will use *real* material extracted from different locations to characterize the thin films formed on real atmospheric aerosol, determine their film thicknesses, light scattering ability and their chemical reactivity in the atmosphere. Our own preliminary work demonstrates that laboratory proxy thin films are not representative of the real atmosphere. The film thicknesses are critical to the calculation of their light scattering ability which in turn is critical to calculation of the proportion of sunlight scattered back to space. The chemical reactivity is important in determining the lifetime of the film, because as the film reacts the optical properties of the particle will change significantly. If the film lifetime is longer than a typical aerosol lifetime then it can be simply included into atmospheric models, but if the film lifetime is much shorter then it may be ignored. However preliminary data suggests it is has a similar lifetime meaning the *changing* light scattering properties of a coated particle will need to be modelled. The project represents the first comprehensive study of atmospheric thin film oxidation and light scattering with real atmospheric matter from the atmosphere. The combined experimental and modelling approach will allow the demonstration of (I) core-shell (thin film behavior) from atmospheric samples, (II) calculation of their optical properties and change in radiative balance at the top of the atmosphere., (III) measurement of atmospheric oxidation rates of the film and inclusion in Co-I led complex aerosol kinetic modelling of complex mixture aerosol. The proposal will also continue to develop two emergent exciting techniques for atmospheric science: Laser trapping with Mie spectroscopy and neutron scattering. The ability of these technique to study films ~10nm thick in real time, with the correct morphology and with unprecedented precision is phenomenal. The proposal will also be an excellent training vehicle for two PDRAS in soft-matter, facility, and atmospheric experimental science with real world modelling of atmospheric outcomes. The data and model systems from this proposed work will be ready for including global climate models. The letters os support demonstrate that ends users for some off data with the Met. office(UK) and MPIC (Germany).