WHEALBI is granted 5 M€ by EU-FP7 (Grant no 613 556) for 5 years starting January, 2014. It involves 18 partners (8 academics, 7 industry /SME) in 9 countries and aims at improving European wheat and barley production in competitive and sustainable cropping systems. Germplasm will be selected and characterised by next-generation-sequencing. Adaptive traits will be evaluated in both transnational field experiments and precision phenotyping platforms. Germplasm will be stored in a bio-repository and associated data in knowledge bases that will represent a valuable legacy to the community. Whole genome association scans will be conducted for several traits, signatures of adaptive selection will be explored, and allele mining of candidate genes will reveal new variation associated with specific phenotypes. Prebreeding tools will be developed to optimize the efficiency of allele transfer from unadapted germplasm into elite breeding lines. New methodologies will explore how to optimally exploit the large amount of new genotypic and phenotypic data available. Ideotypes with improved yield stability and tolerance to biotic and climatic stresses will be evaluated in innovative cropping systems, particularly organic farming and no-till agriculture, and an economic evaluation will be conducted. Results will be disseminated to a broad user community, highlighting the benefits and issues associated with the adoption of sustainable wheat and barley crop production. In 2015, WHEALBI has produced significant achievements in several ways. First of all, exome sequence of 512 barley and 512 wheat accessions covering the range of genetic diversity have been produced. These raw data are currently being processed (cleaning, quality control, SNP calling) to be released to WHEALBI partners in early 2016. As an evidence of the value of these data, we already received demands from several consortia to have access, which will be effective soon after first exploitation within WHEALBI. These 1024 accessions have also been planted in the field, at 7 locations for each species, spanning over Europe from Scotland to Turkey. This will allow a comprehensive study of adaptation to a wide range of climatic conditions, and exome data will give insights into its genetic components. In 2016, exome polymorphism will also be “mined” to explore the genetic bases of key adaptive traits, and used in statistical models to improve genetic dissection breeding efficiency, as illustrated by the 1000 bulls genome project (http://www.1000bullgenomes.com). A smaller collection of diverse barley and wheat varieties will also be studied in innovative, more sustainable cropping systems, including organic, to anticipate the needs of future European Agriculture.