Consortia

The pressures exerted on plants by insect pests such as aphids are increasing, as are the viral diseases they carry. The changing climate, reduced insecticide use and the development of resistance to those pesticides that are still authorized have all conspired to boost the life cycle and population dynamics of these pests. With the need to reduce insecticide use, new agro-ecological approaches have emerged in recent decades that use crop genetic diversity as a tool to modify aphid behaviors or performance. To be effective, such approaches require the accurate characterization of plant genetic diversity, yet there is currently no open, high-performance, standardized and affordable phenotyping system available to developers of future applications. The aim of the Gratitude consortium is to fill this gap by developing a digital plant-aphid system that can characterize aphid development and behavior.

The integration of temporal data in biology is a cutting-edge field of research that currently lacks operational methods. The purpose of the TIMe-ID consortium is to build an interdisciplinary community that can progress the development of such methods.

How caterpillars perceive gravity is still not known. However, an evolutionary adaptation in the caterpillars of the European corn borer enables these larvae to use gravity information to move down the cob and thus avoid being killed during harvesting. The main aim of this project is to understand how caterpillars use gravity information to orient their movement.

Gene transcription is an essential process in the adaptive response of plants to environmental constraints. The interdisciplinary scientific consortium PRECURSOR aims to investigate and better understand how this process takes place in the proximal regions of genes to ultimately improve the predictive power of selection models.

Hit by the impacts of a changing climate, cattle farming must adapt to changes in agro-ecological practices. To meet these challenges, a new generation of finely tuned, rapid and minimally invasive phenotyping tools must be developed to ensure the continued compatibility of animal/environment pairings. The EPINUM consortium proposes to deploy machine learning approaches to improve phenotypic prediction based on epigenotyping data.

The Arte-mis consortium will bring together an interdisciplinary community of researchers working at the interface between the experimental and digital sciences to overcome methodological barriers to the creation of digital twins in microbial ecology.

in the nucleus of a cell, the three-dimensional conformation of the genome has a major impact on how it functions. A better understanding of the links between the 3D structure of the genome and its functioning represents a methodological challenge and requires dialogue between different disciplines

Understanding the genetic determinism of a trait, i.e. the set of genes involved in the development and expression of this trait, is a major challenge for better understanding biological processes and supporting genetic improvement programmes.

In biology, as in other scientific fields, the integration of multi-source data is more relevant than ever. Indeed, the data collected are increasingly complex and their volume is growing, due to the development of analytical platforms, imaging techniques, the rise of omics data, etc

In response to the multiple challenges of climate change and multi-performance agriculture, the sciences of breeding and plants are faced with the challenge of selecting breeds or varieties on the basis of increasingly complex phenotypes.