WHEALBI, a 5-year EU-FP7 granted project 2014-2018, involved 18 partners (8 academics, 7 industry /SME) in 9 countries and aimed at improving European wheat and barley production in competitive and sustainable cropping systems. As stated in the acronym, WHEALBI has produced a legacy, i.e. large genotypic and phenotypic data, which have been released after publication for further exploitation by the scientific community. The main corpus of the legacy consists in exome sequence data of a large number of diverse wheat and barley lines. The whealbi collections of 512 barley and 512 wheat lines were selected to represent a wide spatial (worldwide) and temporal (from landraces to elite varieties) genetic diversity. Exome capture and NGS sequencing were achieved, and led to 620,158 robust genetic variants in wheat (among them 595,939 SNPs and InDels between hexaploid accessions) distributed across 41,032 different genes, and 435431 robust SNP in barley. WHEALBI collections have been evaluated for general adaptive traits in filed nurseries distributed along a long geographic and climatic gradient from Scotland to Israel. These data, both genotypic and phenotypic, have been exploited to get new insights into wheat and barley evolution and adaptation. Exome data also allows to mine allele in key genes or gene families, coupled with specific evaluation either in field or controlled conditions, e.g. resistance to drought, frost and various diseases, canopy development, grain protein composition... As an illustration, new sources of resistance to leaf rust and Septoria leaf blotch have been identified. New components transcription factors of grain storage protein gene expression have also been found and integrated in network modelling. Some of these results have been submitted for communication at IWC2019.

WHEALBI also addresses agronomy crop systems. For example, ecophysiology enabled to identify the key adaptive traits that are most sensible to climatic factor, and to estimate the genetic variability of genotypic parameters in crop models. This could be applied to a crop-model assisted ideotype building, by with optimizing the balance among competitive traits, e. g. between light interception and canopy transpiration, precocity and yield... A subset of 25 diverse lines have also been evaluated in large plots conducted in contrasted management (low/high nitrogen, deep/shallow/inversion/non-inversion tillage, organic farming and agroforestry). This may help anticipate the societal demand for more safety and sustainability of the future European Agriculture.

All data of the legacy should be available though the portal (https://wheat-urgi.versailles.INRA.fr/Projects/Whealbi) and more results can be found on www.whealbi.eu.