During the winter period 2022, PhD Tomislav Radić visited the Laboratory of Biology of Plant Interactions led by PhD Raffaella Balestrini at the Institute for the sustainable plant protection in Turin, Italy. There, during three weeks period, under the guidance of experts, he gained methodological knowledge in the determination of expression of genes related to the plant’s response to mycorrhizal status. PhD Radić will transfer the acquired knowledge and skills to his home team at the Institute for Adriatic Crops, where they will work on introducing gene expression methodology into routine use within a project for the purpose of understanding the interactions between grapevine and microorganisms.

PhD student Emanuel Gaši attended a three-week training period which took place from 28th November to 16th December 2022 in the Laboratory for functional genomics, Institute for Sustainable Plant Protection, Turin, Italy. Under the guidance of PhD Giorgio Gambino, he gained knowledge on the detection and relative quantification of viruses in various grapevine tissues using real-time quantitative PCR methodology. Learned skills will be applied in further work at home Institute on real time qPCR machine which was acquired from the “MYCO GRAPE” project.