Science at UM [S03-ep09]: Neighbor-mediated susceptibility in plants

[Podcast] - Published on November 23, 2023 in Science and Society

This week on *A l’UM la science*, Jean-Benoit Morel, a researcher at the Montpellier Institute of Plant Health (Phim), talks to us about plant immunity. Our report takes us to the SMEL technical facility with Valentin Kempf. Finally, Nathan Roure, press relations officer at UM, presents the program for the Sud de Sciences science film festival. A show broadcast every Wednesday at 6 p.m. on Divergence FM 93.9.

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Ah, the neighbors! My mom always told me, “Get into a fight with whoever you want, but not with your neighbors.” And yet… When you live in the city, it’s hard to stay calm when the bass from the girl upstairs keeps making the bedframe shake at 5 a.m., or when the guy downstairs has taken your parking spot again because he’s saving his own for his RV. You might say, it’s no better in the countryside, between the crazy people who poison cats and those who mow their lawns at 7 a.m. on Sundays… Yes, neighbors can be a real pain.

And remember COVID. Our horrified stares in the elevator at a nose peeking out from under a mask, or the atmosphere at meetings and family dinners when a simple sneeze felt more threatening than a bomb on the subway. Depending on the context or how crowded our spaces are, our neighbors can become a living hell… Just as they can also be our best bulwarks against life’s uncertainties—and here again, I refer you to Covid. Perhaps one of the most striking contemporary demonstrations that collective strategy—whether it involves a mask or a vaccine—can contribute to greater resistance to disease.

What if plants behaved the same way? What if, in a wheat field, the proximity of each ear of wheat could have a positive or negative impact on their disease resistance? This is what Jean-Benoît Morel, a researcher and director of the Phim Laboratory for Plant Health at the Montpellier Institute, sought to discover by testing the impact of proximity on the disease resistance of different varieties of wheat and rice. The results were published in the journal PLOS Biology.

Learn more:

Read the post
Read the press release
Also listen to the episode of *A l’UM la science* titled“Varietal Blends at the Food TechnologyLab”

In the second half of the program, we continue our exploration of the Mediterranean Coastal Environment Station in Sète with Valentin Kempf, and we take a closer look at the analytical platform.