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 collaborative initiative led by five institutions—CIRAD, the University of Montpellier (UM), INRA, IRD, and CNRS—and launched by five research units: BPMP, DIADE-IPME, AGAP, L2C, and IES, with support from 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 utilized by industry, are major challenges of the environmental and energy transition. The challenge is to understand and control how environmental disturbances impact these key physiological functions and, ultimately, the yield and quality of crop production.

The “PlantEnvi” project is specifically aimed at maintaining and developing the technologies deployed on platforms for genotyping, proteomics, plant imaging, and spectroscopy. These approaches make it possible to cover a wide range of levels of integration, from the cell to the whole plant. Another objective is to provide innovative solutions for the development of molecular barcoding methods that enable the taxonomic characterization of individuals or samples using high-throughput sequencing techniques. Finally, regarding plant imaging, the focus will be on developing in vivo microscopy for the dynamic study of signaling, transport, and developmental processes involved in plants’ responses to environmental changes. In addition, the “PlantEnvi” project aims to promote innovative approaches based on MRI/NMR and terahertz technologies, building on the Etendard APLIM project funded by Agropolis Foundation and Labex Agro. These technologies (portable NMR, terahertz sensors) are being developed in close collaboration with the physics and 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 to study the adaptive response of plants in situ. Thus, this project will draw not only on the agronomy and plant biology community but also on expertise in physics and instrumentation to foster translational research—from the laboratory to the field and from the field to the laboratory—which is essential for addressing the challenges facing agriculture in the face of climate change.

Partners

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