Section: Other Grants and Activities

International Bilateral Relations

ANR-BBSRC Grant

Participants : Christophe Godin, Jan Traas, Etienne Farcot, Yassin Refahi, Andrew Bangham [ Univ. East Anglia ] , Enrico Coen [ John Innes Center, UK ] , Robert Sablowski [ John Innes Center, UK ] , François Parcy [ CNRS ] .

(Contractor for Virtual Plants: INRIA. From September 2008 to September 2011)

Flower Model: Modeling growth and gene regulation in floral organs is a project funded by the ANR-BBSRC programme System Biology (SysBio). Systems biology aims to explain and predict the behaviour of complex biological systems by quantitative analysis and modeling of the interactions between all the relevant components. An important challenge for the years to come is how to integrate the approaches used for growth analysis at different stages with the role of regulatory genes to produce predictive models of floral organ growth and patterning. To address this question, this project brings together leading UK and French teams with complementary expertise on imaging, floral development and quantitative modeling, to focus on a comparative analysis of sepal and petal growth in Arabidopsis. We will initially use live imaging and sector analysis to produce quantitative models of growth for these organs. We will integrate information on regulatory genes with spatial information to produce in silico models of the regulatory network controlling sepal and petal development. We expect that the following objectives can be reached at the end of this project:

• Capture quantitative data on sepal and petal morphogenesis

• Analyze and model the regulatory networks underlying sepal and petal development

• Link morphogenesis to regulatory networks

• Create an integrated database of complex datasets

Other bilateral relations

There is currently an active connection with the group of Malcolm Bennett, at the Center for Plant Integrative Biology (CPIB) in Nottingham. In June 2009 M. Bennett visited us in Montpellier, in July C. Godin and J. Chopard went to CPIB, several researchers and students from CPIB have visited our team, and Mikaël Lucas is a post-doc sharing his time between the two groups.

The team of Pr. Prusinkiewicz at the University of Calgary (Canada) is an associated team of Virtual Plants . In this context, C. Godin and F. Boudon both spent several weeks in Calgary, and Wojtek Palubiki and Adam Runions, two PhD students, have come for a 2 months, and 2 weeks visits respectively.

Yann Guédon is working with Claudia Negron, David Da Silva and Ted DeJong (University of California, Davis) on stochastic models for the branching and axillary flowering structures of peach and almond shoots.