The general objective of the EU-funded EURIGEN project is the characterisation and exploitation of European ricegenetic resources of the temperate rice growing area, to enhance competitiveness of Europe in rice production, andalleviation of biotic and abiotic constraints typical of the Mediterranean area. This goal is achievable by means of theacquisition, evaluation and conservation of existing rice accessions, and identification of new genetic materials targetedat sustainable agricultural systems, making use of the most updated genomic tools. The project has two major targets: i)identification and conservation of genetic resources and ii) identification of valuable sources of new genes and alleles foragronomic and quality traits relevant to breeding programs. The main platform of the project is the classification,maintenance and regeneration of the temperate rice germplasm bank. A panel of 455 rice accessions relevant forbreeding programs in European growing areas were analysed at both phenotypic and genotypic level. A centralisedseed bank of the collection was established and a DNA biorepository organised in bar-coded 96-well plates was createdand made available to the EURIGEN partners. A core collection of 200 rice accessions was selected based uponphylogenetic analyses and phenotyped in the field and controlled conditions for adaptation to biotic and abiotic stressesincluding blast, reduced water availability and salinity. To identify molecular markers associated with the adaptation traitsas well as alleles ensuring the best performance under stress, the 200 accessions were genotyped with 384 SNPs usingthe high-throughput ILLUMINA BeadExpress genotyping platform. The SNPs were selected in candidate genes involvedin stress responses based on literature data and preliminary results from ongoing projects at international level. Theintegration of phenotypic and genotypic data will enable us to carry out association analyses and valorise the existingnatural variatio