PRIME@MUSE promotes advances in plant drought resistance in collaboration with regional companies
With support from the Occitanie Region, PRIME@MUSE will drive advances in research on plant drought resistance in collaboration with regional companies. The Charles Coulomb Laboratory has received PRIME funding to develop the tools needed to study drought mitigation strategies.
The goal is to identify a drought-tolerant sunflower variety. During the dehydration process, we measured variations in the thickness of the different layers that make up a leaf, as well as changes in their refractive index and absorption coefficient, in a set of pre-selected sunflower lines.
This study was conducted as part of a collaboration between the Charles Coulomb Laboratory (Dominique Coquillat),the Joint Research Unit on Technologies and Methods for Tomorrow’s Agriculture (INRAE – Ryad Bendoula, head of the ANR OptiPAG project), the Fresnel Institute in Marseille (Claude Amra), and Innolea (a research company specializing in plant genetics and genomics).
Thanks to the work of the research teams and funding from the “grants for innovative research conducted with businesses” program (MUSE – Occitanie Region), researchers were able to develop a technique that allows for the identification of different layers without destroying the plant.
Funding for a large-sample pulsed terahertz spectroscopy imaging system was made possible because the researchers are collaborating with regional companies interested in this innovative technique.
"The ultimate goal is to contribute to plant improvement (sunflowers in this example) by promoting their adaptation to stressful environmental conditions. “To this end, our terahertz research, funded in part by PRIME@MUSE, aims to help identify favorable leaf traits and to develop terahertz tools that enable continuous observation of plants under stress conditions,”explains Dr. Dominique Coquillat.
This is therefore a significant regional breakthrough, as it represents a valuable future tool for the company in helping it understand why a particular genotype is drought-resistant.
References:
Yannick Abautret, Dominique Coquillat,Myriam Zerrad,Ryad Bendoula,Gabriel Soriano,Daphné Héran,Bruno Grèzes-Besset,Frédéric Chazallet, andClaude Amra“Optical thickness of a plant leaf measured with THz pulse echoes,” Proc. SPIE 11279, Terahertz, RF, Millimeter, and Submillimeter-Wave Technology and Applications XIII, 112790L (March 2, 2020);