Description

Understanding how tropical and Mediterranean plants respond to their environment is a tremendous societal challenge in the implementing of adapted crop management practices, the breeding of new cultivars able to cope with environmental constraints and the maintaining of plant productivity in a context of climatic change. Many groups in the LabEx Agropolis community have to deal with these important issues at different scales i.e. molecular, cellular, organs, whole plant.

Today, the most complex plant stress response-related issue is the integration and co-ordination of these multi-scale processes. Whereas research has benefited from the development of cutting-edge technologies to investigate each of these levels, integrative studies are still at their early stages and need pluridisciplinary support.

To tackle this important question, APLIM aims at federating the communities of plant physiologists, physicists, electronics engineers and chemist from LabEx Agropolis, Numev and CheMISyst, respectively. In synergy, the consortium will develop non-invasive integrative techniques, namely Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, relaxometry and Imaging (MRI) which will meet the specific needs for plant studies and allow to map main physiological plant functions through a multi-scale approach i.e. from molecular, cellular to tissue and organ scales.