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Coordination: Pierre Hilson

Industrial partner: Confidential

Farmers rely on herbicides for plant production because they simplify the cropping systems. But their extensive use led to the emergence of resistant weeds threatening common agricultural practices. In parallel, herbicides’ impacts on health and the environment are increasingly recognized prompting stricter regulations and reducing the range of accepted active substances. Our general objective is the development of innovative technologies for the rapid characterization of leads towards new effective herbicides, innocuous to non-target species. The SPHERE project takes advantage of the ability to select in vitro plant cell lines encoding resistance to toxic molecules. We will develop protocols for the rapid production of Arabidopsis calli resistant to herbicides and demonstrate that the comparative genome analysis of independent de novo mutant cell lines results in the straightforward identification of the causal allele(s). Robust methods for plant somatic cell genetics will require the precise fine-tuning of the selection pressure, which is the core of this project: it has to be sufficient to amplify resistant genotypes, but gradual or moderate enough to maintain proliferating cell populations.