BRAVISSIMO- BRAssinosteroid Venture Increasing StudentS' International MObility is a Marie Curie Initial Training Networks (ITN) funded by the European Commission as part of its Seventh Framework Programme.

The project started on September 1, 2008 and is scheduled to run over a period of four years. The aim of this project is to gain a conceptual advance into the function of plant steroid hormones, brassinosteroids in Arabidopsis thaliana and to translate this understanding into model crop plants. The project integrates different expertise and provides a full training of young scientists to ensure that they will acquire a clear understanding and appreciation of how different techniques can be effectively used in the context of an integrated research programme.

A future challenge for the European agriculture is to satisfy the growing demands for food in a sustainable manner. Understanding the basic mechanics of plant growth will ultimately lead to our ability to increase yield, while decreasing the need for fertilizer and pesticides. Plant growth is regulated by developmental programmes that can be modified by environmental cues acting through endogenous signalling molecules such as plant hormones. Brassinosteroids (BRs) are the growth-promoting polyhydroxylated steroid hormones of plants. BRs are implicated in multiple developmental processes and as such they determine important agronomic traits including biomass, crop yield, and stress and pathogen adaptation. In addition to the well-elucidated BR biosynthetic pathway, during the past decade a significant progress led to the identification of multiple BR signalling components. Despite this key issues remained unsolved. It is still unclear how BRs control growth, how the levels of BRs change throughout development and in response to environment and how different hormonal pathways interact within cells. It is still unknown if different signalling pathways mediated other non BRs effects and how the redundancy in BR signalling components fine tunes the pleiotropic action of those hormones. The BRAVISSIMO network will created a training programme which will guarantee the comprehensive education needed in future to establish a competitive and leading European science in the interdisciplinary field of plant signalling. BRAVISSIMO will strengthen the BR field of research in Europe and will increase its ability to compete effectively with non-EU researchers via coordination, integration and introduction of more interdisciplinary approaches.