CPER Plant-Envi

CPER Plants and Environment, April 2022- March 2028

Project coordinator: Jean-Luc Verdeil (CIRAD)

The "Plants and Environment (PlantEnvi): Adaptation of plants to climate change: Understand, Improve, Cultivate, Feed " is an action collectively led by five institutions: CIRAD, the University of Montpellier (UM), INRA, IRD and CNRS and initiated by five research units: BPMP, DIADE-IPME, AGAP, L2C, IES with the support of the BioCampus Montpellier service unit. Against a backdrop of climate change, ensuring food plant production and its quality, as well as the production of biomass for industrial use, represent major challenges for the 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.

More specifically, the "PlantEnvi" project aims to maintain and develop the technologies deployed on the genotyping, proteomics, plant imaging and spectroscopy platforms. These approaches cover a wide range of integration levels, 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 the development of in vivo microscopy for the dynamic study of signaling, transport and development processes involved in plant response to environmental variations. In addition, the "PlantEnvi" project aims to promote innovative approaches based on NMR/MRI and Terahertz technologies, following on from 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 Institut d'Electronique et des Systèmes (UM/CNRS) (APLIM project, PRIME II Terahertz project). Their aim is to move from the laboratory to the field to study the adaptive response of plants in naturae. In addition to the agronomy/plant biology community, this project will mobilize skills in physics and instrumentation to foster the emergence of translational research: from the laboratory to the field, and from the field to the laboratory, which is essential to meet the challenges facing agriculture in the face of climate change.

Partners

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