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A better understanding of how gonadal cells decode intracellular signalling is essential if we are to improve and better control reproduction.

Understanding how plants defend themselves against pathogens is a major challenge for moving towards an agriculture that uses fewer pesticides.

Today, agriculture faces many challenges, including to avoid the development of certain pathogens resulting from the reduction in the use of inputs with a view to sustainable agriculture as well as the effects of climate change. In this context, many questions arise in the short term about the adaptive capacities of these bio-aggressors. Will an insect pest resist the next heat wave? Or will it instead be greatly affected by rising temperatures and cease to be a threat ?

Emerging arboviruses (e.g. Zika, West Nile virus) represent a global threat to human and veterinary public health. Mostly of zoonotic origin, these viruses are transmitted to vertebrate hosts by arthropod vectors, such as mosquitoes or ticks.

In plant and animal genetics, selection programmes aim to identify individuals whose performance (yield, resistance to disease or environmental stress) meets previously defined criteria. This selection requires the acquisition of data, in the field or in breeding, which can be costly or time-consuming.

Integrative biology is based on the study of complex biological networks. Understanding the plasticity of biological interaction networks due to phenotypic, environmental or interventional variability is an important challenge in fields as diverse as genomics or human nutrition. Such studies often include comparisons between contrasting groups, including variables of various natures (continuous, counts, binary, etc.). These so-called "mixed-type" data can be difficult to analyse in a unified way. While multivariate probabilistic models provide a robust framework for inferring interrelationships among continuous variables, an analogous model for mixed-type data has yet to be defined.

The prion paradigm unifies a number of age-related, devastating neurodegenerative pathologies. The PrionDif project seeks to develop a multi-scale mechanistic model accounting for the spatiotemporal dynamic of prion spreading within the brain. This approach will allow the identification of key processes to enable therapeutic advances and promote early diagnosis.

The development of genomic selection - and other "omics" analyses such as metagenomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics and proteomics - now makes it possible to characterise animals using thousands of measurements. This massive data is integrated into models to predict production traits with the highest possible degree of accuracy.

Climate change is characterised not only by variable and extreme intensities of the main climatic factors but also by an increased frequency of extreme events, such as heat waves, which are highly detrimental to field crop yields and harvest quality.

Plants are constantly threatened by biotic and abiotic stresses, especially in the current context of climate change. The complexity of the stress response involves different levels of biological organisation, from genomes to metabolites.