Plant responses to their complex environment

Coordinators

Anne-Sophie FIORUCCI; Eoghan KING; Antoine DIET

Goals

- Dissect signal transduction pathways in plants during development or in response to their abiotic and/or biotic environment.
 - Describe and analyze the scientific results generated by different methods/approaches studied in this course.
 - Synthesize the results of a publication and present it in an integrated context; criticize the limits of the paper and propose perspectives on the topic.

Skills

- Work as a group to analyze and present a research paper. Identify the limits of the paper and propose future perspectives.
- Reason on the choice of methods/approaches to analyze plant responses to their environment.
- Interpret the scientific results presented in a publication, identify key conclusions of the study and link them to the scientific context.

Content

Perception and acclimation to these variations go through complex and interconnected signaling pathways and modulation of endogenous signals like phytohormones. Moreover, contrary to lab conditions, where in most cases only one parameter is studied at a time, plants actually integrate various environmental information at once, resulting in complex phenotypic outputs. This is of utmost importance in the context of global climate change, with an increase in the frequency, intensity, and combination of abiotic and biotic stresses directly affecting plant growth, health and productivity. Understanding how plants perceive, integrate, and respond to multiple and changing environmental stresses is thus essential.

The main objective of the teaching unit is to demonstrate how integrative and multidisciplinary approaches, including plant biology, microbiology, genomics, genetics, physiology, biochemistry, and epidemiology, can be developed to decipher the molecular mechanisms governing plant-environment interactions.

To do so, the course will provide in-depth knowledge of the molecular mechanisms involved in perception, signal transduction and early responses of plants to different stimuli (biotic -symbiotic and pathogenic-, abiotic). Research strategies and associated techniques commonly used to analyze plant responses either to a single or to multiple environmental stresses will be presented in the frame of lectures, tutorials and seminars.

Format

The teaching unit lasts two weeks and is organized in 2-3h sessions consisting of:
 - Lectures and tutorials around transversal concepts/techniques/strategies relevant to studying plant responses to the environment.
 - Research seminars given by French or foreign expert scientists. A discussion between the students and the speaker is organized at the end of each seminar.
 - Personal work addressing examples of signaling pathways and crosstalks between abiotic and biotic stresses. The students analyze a set of articles in order to identify the research strategy, the main achievements of each paper and the main outcomes.

The final mark is based on two evaluations: oral presentation of the scientific analysis of research articles (50% of the mark), a final written exam at the end of the semester (50% of the final mark).

Special teaching methods

Students will visit Plant Sciences laboratories in the Saclay area with a dedicated day into these laboratories.

Language : English

Mandatory

ECTS : 5

Lectures : 20 ;  Directed Study : 25