The scientific leadership rests with Vicent Arbona Mengual of the Department of Biology, Biochemistry and Natural Sciences at Universitat Jaume I. His team also includes Miguel González Guzmán, coordinator of the GaMBiT research group – Genetic and Metabolic Integration of Biotic and Abiotic Interactions – together with Rosario Vidal and Beatriz Julián from the Institute of Advanced Materials (INAM-UJI). The wider consortium spans 11 partners from five countries: Spain, Italy, France, Germany and Sweden. Spanish participants include the Valencian Institute for Agricultural Research and the Galician University–Business Foundation. Italy contributes the Council for Agricultural Research and Economics (CREA) and UNITEC S.p.A., while France is represented by the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development (CIRAD), the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE) and Doriane SAS. Germany’s Computomics GmbH and CYBRES GmbH join the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences to complete the partnership.

The project’s primary biological targets are sweet orange (Citrus sinensis) and mandarin (Citrus reticulata), two species that dominate global citrus production and consumption. The central objective is to generate genetically modified lines with greater resilience to the adverse conditions caused by climate change and its exacerbating effects on pests and diseases. Rising temperatures, altered rainfall patterns and shifting pest distributions are already straining citrus orchards across the Mediterranean and beyond, making the development of hardier varieties an increasingly urgent agricultural priority. By combining stress physiology expertise with advanced genetic engineering, the consortium aims to produce trees that can maintain productivity under conditions that would compromise conventional varieties.

Resilience is only half of the project’s ambition. CitrusAld also pursues the biofortification of citrus fruits to enhance their nutritional properties. Citrus fruits are widely regarded as functional foods that combine nutritional value with health-promoting properties, thanks to their antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and cardioprotective effects. The project seeks to increase naturally occurring beneficial compounds such as flavonoids and furanocoumarins, while also introducing a compound that citrus does not normally produce: resveratrol. This stilbene, best known as a constituent of grapes and cocoa, has been selected for its cardioprotective and anti-ageing properties. If successful, the work could transform an everyday fruit into an even richer source of bioactive molecules, blurring the line between conventional nutrition and functional food design.

Identifying which genes to modify in a genome as complex as citrus is a formidable challenge, and this is where artificial intelligence enters the project. The consortium will design and implement AI-based systems capable of analysing and integrating large volumes of biological data to pinpoint the most suitable target genes for each desired modification. Rather than relying on laborious trial-and-error approaches, the researchers intend to use computational pipelines that can sift through genomic, transcriptomic and metabolic datasets to prioritise candidate genes whose manipulation is most likely to yield stress tolerance or enhanced nutritional profiles. This data-driven gene discovery methodology represents one of the project’s key methodological innovations and reflects a broader trend of machine learning reshaping plant biotechnology.

Once target genes are identified, the actual genetic modifications will be carried out using New Genomic Techniques, or NGTs, which are now permitted in Europe under the newly updated regulatory framework. These techniques allow precise edits to a plant’s genome without introducing foreign DNA in the way older transgenic methods did, and their recent regulatory acceptance in the European Union has opened the door to projects of this kind. The consortium will also integrate novel materials capable of overcoming existing biological barriers that have historically limited the genetic efficiency of citrus species. Citrus is notoriously difficult to transform genetically, with recalcitrant tissues, long generation times and barriers to regeneration, so the development of new delivery materials could prove as consequential as the gene edits themselves.

In parallel with genome editing, the consortium will explore complementary strategies based on RNA interference technology. RNAi allows researchers to slow down or silence the expression of specific genes without permanently altering the genome, offering a reversible and highly targeted means of modulating plant traits. A central technical hurdle for RNAi in plants is delivering the interfering molecules into plant tissues, where cell walls and other barriers block conventional approaches. The CitrusAld team plans to use novel materials as delivery vehicles into plant tissues, an approach that draws on the materials science expertise within the consortium and could establish new protocols for transient gene silencing in woody perennial crops.

The funding mechanism behind the project is as distinctive as its science. The EIC Pathfinder Challenges programme, part of the European Innovation Council, supports highly innovative, high-risk scientific research with the potential to generate entirely new technologies in the future. It deliberately funds the early stages of research, when ideas are still being explored in the laboratory and there is not yet a clear commercial application. The programme’s objective is to establish the scientific and technological foundations for breakthroughs that, in the long term, can transform entire sectors or help address major societal challenges. For a crop that underpins the economies of Mediterranean regions and provides vitamin-rich food to billions of people, the societal stakes of climate-resilient citrus are considerable.

The four-year project will begin in October 2026 under proposal number 101306995, giving the consortium a defined window in which to deliver its gene discovery pipelines, transformation protocols and biofortified citrus lines. The breadth of the partnership – spanning academic plant science institutes, agricultural research organisations, materials specialists and companies – suggests a deliberate effort to cover the full pipeline from fundamental gene discovery to applied field-relevant varieties. The involvement of computational firms such as Computomics and CYBRES alongside plant science heavyweights like INRAE and CIRAD signals that the AI and data integration components are treated as core infrastructure rather than an afterthought.

For consumers and growers alike, the project’s promise is twofold: citrus trees better equipped to endure a warming, pest-pressured world, and fruit with an enhanced portfolio of health-promoting compounds. Whether engineered resilience and resveratrol-enriched oranges will reach commercial orchards remains a question for the years beyond the project’s horizon, but CitrusAld represents one of the most comprehensive European attempts to marry genomics, artificial intelligence, materials science and plant breeding in service of a single iconic crop. As climate change accelerates and the tools of biotechnology mature, the humble orange may become a showcase for how 21st-century science re-engineers the foods we have cultivated for millennia.

Subject of Research: Genetic modification of citrus crops for climate resilience and nutritional biofortification

Article Title: Universitat Jaume I leads European consortium to develop genetically modified citrus lines with greater resilience to climate change, pests and diseases

Article References: Universitat Jaume I leads European consortium to develop genetically modified citrus lines with greater resilience to climate change, pests and diseases. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: citrus, genetic modification, climate change, EIC Pathfinder, Universitat Jaume I, New Genomic Techniques, RNA interference, biofortification, resveratrol, artificial intelligence, sweet orange, mandarin

The bet paid off. Individually, each of these units possesses limited intelligence and only fragmentary information about the world. Together, however, by exchanging local signals and coordinating their behaviour, they can build a shared representation of their existence, their environment and their goals. The researchers call this collaborative awareness, and it became the conceptual backbone of the entire project. The consortium brought together an unusually broad set of disciplines: artificial intelligence and robotics researchers from the University of Pisa, philosophers and cognitive scientists from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, swarm robotics specialists at the University of Bristol, soft robotics experts at Delft University of Technology, and the French research hub Da Vinci Labs. Over four years, this group produced not just papers, but a philosophical, mathematical and technological framework for awareness in artificial systems—along with robotic prototypes, more sustainable AI architectures, startup ventures and follow-up European projects.

One of the project’s most important contributions is a careful conceptual distinction that separates awareness from consciousness. Consciousness, in the philosophical sense, is generally associated with subjective or phenomenal experience: having feelings, or experiencing the world from a particular first-person perspective. Awareness, as the EMERGE team defines it, is something far more tractable. “In EMERGE, we understand awareness more operationally, as the capacity of an agent to process and integrate information in a way that is relevant to its actions,” explains Ophelia Deroy, philosopher and cognitive scientist at LMU Munich. Crucially, the project’s experiments showed that people can understand an artificial system as aware without ever assuming that it has subjective experience. That separation matters enormously for public perception and for the ethics of human–machine interaction, because it allows engineers to build and describe aware machines without drifting into claims about machine sentience.

To make the concept scientifically useful rather than merely evocative, the researchers decomposed awareness into distinct dimensions that can be applied across individuals and collective systems: spatial awareness, temporal awareness, self-awareness, agentive awareness and metacognitive awareness. Rather than treating awareness as an all-or-nothing property—a binary switch that a system either possesses or lacks—the framework ties each dimension to specific capabilities and concrete tasks. This move transforms a philosophical puzzle into an experimental programme. It becomes possible, for the first time, to test empirically whether increasing a system’s awareness along a particular dimension actually improves its performance on a defined task, and to measure by how much. The result is a research methodology in which awareness is not asserted but demonstrated, dimension by dimension, capability by capability.

The mathematical and computational core of the project addresses a deceptively simple question: how can awareness emerge across a physically distributed system in which no single agent sees the whole picture? The EMERGE framework describes how simple local information, exchanged with neighbouring agents, can be integrated so that the collective coordinates its actions toward solving a task. “The beauty of the approach is that the system operates in a distributed way,” says Sabine Hauert, professor at the University of Bristol. “This way systems that can scale to large numbers of agents and remain operational when individual robots fail or conditions change. It also allows humans to interact with the systems as a coordinated collective rather than controlling each robot separately.” In practical terms, that means a swarm does not collapse when one of its members breaks down, and a human supervisor can issue intentions to the group as a whole instead of micromanaging every unit.

At Delft University of Technology, the framework was pushed toward physical robotic bodies. “We want robots that can understand how their actions affect the world, anticipate what people and other robots are doing, and adapt accordingly,” explains Cosimo Della Santina, associate professor at TU Delft. “That is a key step toward robotic systems that can operate more autonomously and work naturally alongside humans.” This anticipation of consequences—understanding how one’s own movements reshape the environment, and predicting the trajectories of both human partners and fellow machines—is precisely the kind of integrated, action-relevant information processing that the project’s operational definition of awareness was built to capture. It is also what separates a genuinely collaborative robot from a pre-programmed arm repeating fixed motions.

The consortium’s mathematical framework also delivered an unexpected dividend for machine learning itself: parsimony. Systems built on the EMERGE principles proved capable of learning from substantially smaller quantities of data than conventional architectures require. “Many AI systems today depend on large, centralized computing infrastructures,” says Claudio Gallicchio, associate professor at the University of Pisa. “Our results open the way to a more decentralized and environmentally sustainable models, in which data can be processed locally using small and energy-efficient devices, such as neuromorphic hardware, reducing energy consumption, network traffic and latency while improving privacy.” In an era when training frontier models consumes enormous energy budgets and concentrates computational power in a handful of data centres, the prospect of aware, adaptive systems running on small, low-power edge hardware carries implications far beyond robotics—touching sustainability, data sovereignty and the geopolitics of computing.

The project also confronted the human side of the equation, and the findings are sobering. Bahador Bahrami, director of the Crowd Cognition group at LMU Munich, notes that “our work also examined the ethical side of human interaction with collaboratively aware systems, with important implications for future environments in which groups of humans and artificial agents will have to interact, negotiate and cooperate.” Among the studies was research into how people behave toward automated systems such as self-driving cars. The result: users may be more willing to take advantage of artificial agents than of human counterparts—a phenomenon the researchers describe as algorithmic exploitation. People who would never cut in front of another driver may happily exploit a machine, precisely because it cannot be offended, retaliate, or hold them socially accountable. Understanding this asymmetry, the team argues, is essential for designing and governing artificial systems that interact directly with people.

EMERGE was deliberately structured as a pathway from foundational research to technological innovation, and its results are already spinning out into ventures. Embodied AI develops efficient AI models for future generations of humanoid robots. ContinualIST builds AI models efficient enough to run on smaller, lower-power hardware. Collective Robotics focuses on swarms of robots that coordinate and operate collectively, and Phoebe is dedicated to systems in which humans and artificial agents solve problems together. The concepts will also anchor new research projects: EIC Pathfinder SWIFT-BUILD will apply collaboration among multiple robots and humans to automated construction, while HE MINGLE and ADA-COLLAB investigate how general-purpose, agentic AI systems can form societies, collaborate with one another, and interact with humans. Even public engagement got its own artefact: nOdes, an artistic installation in which an interactive swarm exchanges information and changes its behaviour in response to both its agents and its human visitors, letting anyone experience collaborative awareness firsthand.

“EMERGE started from a fundamental question about awareness, but it has ended with very concrete results: new robotic systems, more sustainable AI architectures, new startup initiatives and follow-up projects that are already carrying forward the idea of building artificial systems that are more efficient, sustainable, collaborative, and imbued with human values,” concludes Davide Bacciu, professor at the University of Pisa and coordinator of the project. The project was funded by the European Union under Grant Agreement 101070918, with UK participants supported by UKRI grant number 10038942. Its legacy is a reframing of one of technology’s oldest ambitions: intelligence may not need to be concentrated, enormous and opaque. It can be distributed, modest, energy-lean and—perhaps most importantly—legible to the humans who live alongside it. The swarms are small, but the idea they carry is anything but.

Subject of Research: Collaborative awareness in distributed artificial agents and swarm robotics

Article Title: European project EMERGE concludes advancing collective awareness in artificial systems

Article References: European project EMERGE concludes advancing collective awareness in artificial systems. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: EMERGE project, collaborative awareness, swarm robotics, distributed AI, EIC Pathfinder, machine learning, neuromorphic hardware, human-robot interaction, algorithmic exploitation, sustainable AI, philosophy of mind, cognitive science