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The Participatory Plant Breeding (PPB) concept emerged twenty years ago, particularly with the aim to build alternative organizations of the plant breeding activities in developing countries. It now as well questions the developed countries, in the frame of a more global expectation to make all the stakeholders more involved in the agricultural production, from the farmers to its final clients. We discuss here some of the questions addressed by this trend with regard to the definition of the ideotype: (a) different forms of PPB? (b) changing the paradigm: Client Oriented Breeding? (c) a new way to manage {genotype * environment} interactions? (d) mainly societal concerns at stake? (e) biodiversity and ideotypes. As the same key, technical, limiting factors are involved in both PPB and classical breeding, it is suggested to consider PPB as one of the ways in the frame of a general expectation for diversification, thus eventually resulting in the promotion of alternative ideotypes, rather than an alternative process.

The sunflower crop is occupying an increasing role in the oilseed world production, and particularly within the geographic Europe, for human and industrial purposes. The advantages of the sunflower crop are also increasing due to its environmentally safe status. But there is a need to increase the oil yield per ha in order to improve the competitiveness of farmers and oil industry. This paper is reviewing the genetic, genomic and bioinformatic resources being necessary to handle research programs aiming to provide information for plant breeding as well as more fundamental knowledge. Beside of them, phenotyping tools and modeling approaches appear to be the new frontier for the genetic dissection of traits of interest.

In sunflower, the active leaf area during the grain filling period has been shown to be an important character, which can be used to predict seed yield. Total and residual leaf areas of inbred lines and their hybrids are significantly correlated, but there may be some interaction between parents. Strict sense heritability is moderate. The relation between residual leaf area and seed yield has been confirmed using simplified leaf measurements on recombinant inbred lines and estimation of leaf area index with a ceptometer on hybrids. Studies of use of residual leaf area as a character in breeding for seed yield showed that F2 or F3 plants with the smallest leaf areas can be discarded, but, according to genotype, those with medium or largest leaf area give the best seed yields.

The French plant genome initiative GENOPLANTE, associating public research and private companies involved in research for agriculture breeding or agrochemicals , supported several projects in oilseed rape genomics. Some of them intensively used Arabidopsis resources. Beside applied projects including gene cloning or QTL identification, GENOPLANTE succeeded in establishing a set of biological and bioinformatics resources available for the genetic improvement of this crop.

Due to the geographical specialization in oilseed world production, Europe has a major role to play in winter oilseed rape and sunflower breeding. Mainly based on the most recen t results, this review aims to identify the main research and breeding targets for these two crops, as seen through publications, with an attempt to suggest what are opportunities and challenges in these research fields. Growing a healthy and yielding crop remains the key driver for agronomic production. However sustainability and environmental profiles of the cultivar are now entering the field of play: The sustainability concern invested the field of resistance to diseases. Nitrogen use efficiency became an important target for Brassica napus, and crop resilience toward drought stresses is the way chosen in Helianthus annuus breeding for yield improvement. Significant advances are underway for quality traits, but the uncertainty on nutritional and industrial demand may explain why the product diversification remains low.