CPER Plant-Envi

CPER Plants and Environment, April 2022–March 2028

Project coordinator: Jean-Luc Verdeil (CIRAD)

The "Plants and Environment (PlantEnvi): Plant Adaptation to Climate Change: Understand, Improve, Cultivate, Feed project is a joint initiative involving five institutions: CIRAD, the University of Montpellier (UM), INRA, IRD, and CNRS. It was initiated by five research units: BPMP, DIADE-IPME, AGAP, L2C, and IES, with the support of the BioCampus Montpellier service unit. In the context of climate change, ensuring food crop production and quality, as well as the production of biomass that can be used by industry, are major challenges for environmental and energy transition. The challenge is to understand and control how environmental disturbances impact these major physiological functions and, ultimately, the yield and quality of plant production.

The PlantEnvi project focuses specifically on maintaining and developing technologies deployed on genotyping, proteomics, plant imaging, and spectroscopy platforms. These approaches enable a wide range of integration levels to be scanned, from the cell to the whole plant. The other objective is to provide innovative solutions in the development of molecular barcoding methods that enable the taxonomic characterization of individuals or samples using high-throughput sequencing techniques. Finally, with regard to plant imaging, the focus will be on developing in vivo microscopy for the dynamic study of the signaling, transport, and development processes involved in plants' response to environmental changes. In addition, the "PlantEnvi" project aims to promote innovative approaches based on MRI/NMR and terahertz technologies, as an extension of the Etendard APLIM project funded by Agropolis Fondation and Labex Agro. These technologies (portable NMR, terahertz sensors) are being developed in close collaboration with the physics/instrumentation teams at the Charles Coulomb Laboratory and the Institute of Electronics and Systems (UM/CNRS) (APLIM project, PRIME II Terahertz project). Their purpose is to move from the laboratory to the field in order to study the adaptive response of plants in naturae. Thus, this project will mobilize, beyond the agronomy/plant biology community, expertise in physics and instrumentation in order to promote the emergence of translational research: from the laboratory to the field, from the field to the laboratory, which is essential to meet the challenges of agriculture in the face of climate change.

Partners

Partner No. 1: CIRAD (Lead Partner) (Manager JL Verdeil)
Partner No. 2: UM (Manager C Goze-Bac)
Partner No. 3: CNRS (Manager C Maurel)
Partner No. 4: INRA (Project leader: C. Maurel)
Partner No. 5: IRD (Project leader: C. Gaudron)