Introduction

Experimental plant research provides mankind with a basis for all kinds of applications of plants on the higher organisation levels such as crop vegetations and ecosystems. Therefore, this type of research is crucial for improvement and modernisation of agricultural plant production. The role of the crop plant as the ultimate basis for sustainable production of food and feed becomes more and more important. Moreover the plant is more frequently used as raw material in different production chains of the agrarian industry for the development of food/non-food applications and of 'green' energy. In modern plant research, the genetic component is an important factor for steering and influencing of all kinds of biochemical and developmental processes in plants from photosynthesis to seed ripening. The new insights and techniques that are obtained in the broad field of life sciences, are of great importance for a good development of experimental plant sciences as well, and vice versa.

This also applies to the research of EPS which is executed at the molecular, cellular, tissue, organ, and individual plant level, often investigated in interaction with (a)biotic factors. The research in EPS is both broad, because of the great number of disciplines present, and coherent, because the research programme continuously becomes better attuned. The coherence was specifically improved by eleven postdoc projects in which different disciplines collaborated. The outcomes of these postdoc projects are described in the Annual Report of 1995. The collaborations with the DLO-institutes have been another factor that influenced the new research programme. This integration process of disciplines and research groups results in quicker and better development of basic knowledge and its spin-offs. The continuity in appointments of Ph.D. students and postdocs, the investments in equipment, and the collaborations with DLO-institutes and other national and international groups, substantially add to this process of quality improvement. Thus, specific EPS research fields rapidly evolved to the international forefront of scientific developments. These important scientific developments in research on plants depend on:

1. the development and use of techniques and knowledge such as DNA sequencing, molecular markers, molecular cytogenetics, time, amplitude and space resolved spectroscopy (luminescence, fluorescence), whole plant NMR and microspectroscopy leading to a substantial contribution in bio-informatics
2. the development and successful use of plant material such as (transgenic) genotypes of Arabidopsis, rice, tomato and potato and backcross products of interspecific hybridisation, the isolation and characterisation of individual genes coding for important traits or triggering important processes
3. specific research subjects related to the basic processes involved in developmental biology such as signal transduction, plant-microbe and plant-insect interactions, metabolic pathways, basic genetics, transgenesis, and the expression, transmission and organisation of transgenes in (crop) plants
4. the translation of the results obtained at the molecular and cellular level in their consequences for the performance at the whole plant level
5. comparison of signal transduction pathways involved in plant and animal organogenesis.

In the new five-year research programme (1998-2003), a theme on genome plasticity expresses the importance of the genetic component in experimental plant research.

Another important improvement in the research programme is the integration of plant biotechnology in all research themes. Thus, plant biotechnology becomes more naturally integrated in fundamental and applied aspects of the EPS research themes:

1. developmental biology of plants
2. interactions between plants and biotic agents
3. metabolism and adaptation
4. genome plasticity