Dr. Michele Zaccai of BGU’s Department of Life Sciences has won an EU Marie Curie Industry-Academia Partnerships and Pathways (IAPP) research grant totaling €430,000 to study the regulation of flowering in flower bulbs. Zaccai will research the response to the cold (vernalization) of bulb flowers in partnership with the Dutch Company Genetwister Technologies.

In nature, most flowers bloom in warm weather while development is slower in cold weather. However, flowers use the cold weather, and specifically its ending, as a trigger to begin the processes that result in blooming. If the triggering mechanisms can be understood, then they can be controlled and flowers made to bloom all year round – a boon to the flower industry and a contribution to natural science.

Zaccai will use the IAPP grant to understand the molecular basis of vernalization – the seasonal blooming of flowers. Her partner, Dr. Douwe de Boer, will provide her with thousands of gene sequences and the bio-informatics know-how to make sense out of them.

The IAPP encourages cooperation between academia and industry. For Zaccai, such a partnership has been in the making for a long time.

“We’ve been thinking about this collaboration for ten years and it was finally the right time. After many years, I discovered only several genes which might be related to vernalization in lilies, but now I’ll get 20,000 of them. It’s a dream come true. They can find thousands of genes involved in the process but they don’t have time to analyze them,” she said.

The IAPP grant is for €430,000 over four years. Zaccai and de Boer will travel back and forth between the Netherlands and Israel for collaborative work. Moreover, some of Zaccai’s students will have the opportunity to be posted to the company, while some of de Boer's employees will be posted to Zaccai’s laboratory.