Plants

A great challenge of modern agriculture will be to manipulate crop plant morphology  to sustain agronomic performance in harsh or suboptimal environments. Using genomics and genetics approaches, our goal is to build a repertoire of alleles that are useful for the improvement of root system architecture in cereals.

In addition, the genetic structure of crop species in relation with their breeding schemes is studied in view of enhancing the search for new alleles in germplasm improvement and establishing conservation strategies.

We are using the model organism Arabidopsis thaliana to understand, beside their function, the transcriptional and post-translational regulations of key selected salt or water stress-induced genes in plant.

Another project relies on the ferrous iron toxicity in cultivated rices (Oryza sativa and O. glaberrima).

A major project concerns ion and metabolite transport at the plant plasma membrane.

Proton pump - ATPases (H+-ATPases) form a proton electrochemical gradient across the membrane which activates many secondary transporters and intervenes in many physiological functions. Our long term aim is to understand how this enzyme is regulated. We also study PDR (pleiotropic drug resistance) transporters belonging to the ABC transporter family.

The discovery of aquaporins (AQPs) that facilitates the movement of water across cellular membranes, provide a unique molecular point of entry to study plant water relations. The research project aims at understanding the function and regulation of maize AQPs at the cellular level and in the whole plant subjected to various environmental conditions.

Another aspect of membrane proteins concerns the understanding of protein transport through the secretory pathway in eukaryotic cells. This is an essential process that performs the delivery of proteins to intracellular organelles and to the cell surface for secretion. We investigate this process in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and in the plant Arabidopsis thaliana.