The first funding period of the CGC (CGC I) began in 2005, when the MPG and four companies (Bayer Crop Science and Bayer Schering Pharma, Organon (later Schering-Plough) and Merck Serono) supported five independent research groups.
The Groups of Markus Kaiser, Luc Brunsveld, Daniel Rauh and Christian Ottmann were located in the BioMedizinZentrum (BMZ) directly adjacent to the Max Planck Institute (MPI) of Molecular Physiology in Dortmund, while the fifth group led by Renier van der Hoorn was hosted at the MPI for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne.