2018 Research highlights

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On 19 December 2017, Céline Van de Paer was supporting her thesis co-financed by the LabEx TULIP and the Occitanie / Pyrénées-Méditerranée Region. An opportunity that we seize to return on his excellent work of research on the cytoplasmic genomes Oléacées (olive trees, ash trees, lilacs, jasmines ...) under the supervision of Guillaume Besnard within the DEEP team (laboratory EDB).

In an article published in January 29, 2018 in the Nature Communications journal, Rémi Peyraud, Ludovic Cottret, Lucas Marmiesse and Stéphane Genin (LIPM) are interested in the modalities of determination by a metabolic network of the robustness of biological functions in a plant pathogen . Financed in 2012 by a TULIP New Frontiers project, an EMBO funding, and the INRA SPE department, their work is based on the modeling of the regulatory network controlling virulence and the metabolic network of Ralstonia solanacearum. These results open new path to identify targets in the fight against this pathogen and they reveal the importance of robustness in the evolution of pathogenicity.

An international consortium of 16 partners, including the LGDP (UMR 5096 CNRS / UPVD) which recently joined the TULIP LabEx has published in Nature genetics an article describing the comparative sequencing of 13 wild and cultivated rice genomes (genus Oryza). The study reveals the evolutionary dynamics of a plant genome over 15 million years and shows that genes, which were thought to be highly conserved within the same genus, are in fact very dynamic (they appear and disappear at an unexpectedly high rates during evolution). A better knowledge of these genomes is a valuable resource for better exploiting the diversity of rice, thus contributing to the world's food security.

Six researchers from the Genome and Plant Development Laboratory (UMR 5096 - CNRS / UPVD) which joined recently TULIP, show in an article published in the Nucleic Acids Research journal that an enzyme involved in RNA metabolism can be controlled by reduction–oxidation reaction.

Although there are many examples of contemporary natural selection, evidence for responses to selection corresponding to predictions is often lacking in wild populations. Resulting from scientific discussions between researchers from several laboratories including 3 TULIP labs (EDB - UMR 5174 CNRS/UPS/IRD, LIPM UMR 2594/441 CNRS/INRA and SETE UMR 5321 CNRS/UPS), this Trends in Ecology & Evolution article explores the combined effects of mechanisms that can accelerate or constrain the response to natural selection.

Several researchers from the Station of Theoretical and Experimental Ecology (SETE - UMR 5321 - CNRS / UPS) of Moulis published in February 2018 an article in PNAS showing that it is possible to identify, in complex ecological communities, collective generic behaviors, that is, robust to empirical uncertainties and modeling assumptions.

Several researchers from the Plant Science Research Laboratory (LRSV - UMR 5546 CNRS / UPS), a constitutive unit of the TULIP LabEx, and 12 other institutions, published an article in the Science journal in May 2018. By comparing 37 plant genomes including 10 newly sequenced, they reveal the fragility of the nitrogen fixing symbiosis.

In an article published in the journal PLOS Genetics, Thomas Badet, Sylvain Raffaele and their team from the LIPM (UMR 2594/441 CRNS / INRA) identified a gene underlying a novel mechanism for resistance to Sclerotinia disease. The study also provides evidence that quantitative disease resistance can take the same evolutionary path in multiple plant lineages.

Researchers from the LIPM (UMR 2594/441 CNRS / INRA) have studied the in natura relationships between microbial communities and potential pathogens in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, in autumn and spring. They published their results in May 2018 in The ISME Journal.

It all started with a group project developed during LabEx TULIP's 2012 Summer School, leading six years later to the publication of an article in Heredity on the non-genetic evolution of the pea aphid between other by several researchers of the Evolution & Biological Diversity laboratory (EDB UMR 5174 Federal University of Toulouse Midi-Pyrenees, CNRS, IRD, UPS). Two of the students who participated in the initial project during the summer school of 2012 are among the authors.A good example of teaching influencing research.

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