How Research at IGEPP answers stake issues

Stakes and Missions

Crop protection is a major social and economic challenge for high quantity and quality food production. Providing humans with healthy food while assuring low contamination and minor ecological effects on biodiversity is critical.

Research at IGEPP is thus focussed on the reduction of pesticides. It aims at developing innovative methods thanks to the combination of academic and applied research.

IGEPP’s missions are:

• To develop integrated and complementary approaches for plant protection
• To develop agroecology approaches for plant protection and culture systems
• To develop sustainable plant resistance approaches
• To develop sustainable agronomical approaches
• To understand the biodiversity and genetics of organisms living in agroecosystems
• To use knowledge on evolution and adaptation of plants, plant pests and their natural enemies
• To decipher the responses to abiotic and biotic stresses of plants, plant pests and their natural enemies.

Strategies and Specificities

From genes …

… to agroecosystems

Strategies at IGEPP can be clustered into three main fields of research that cover a continuum of approaches, from molecular analyses to field experiments:

• “Diversity and evolution of plants and associated organisms”: to decipher and predict - at the genome and population level - adaptive and evolutionary processes in agro-ecosystems
• “Plant responses and adaptation of associated organisms to biotic and abiotic stresses”: to describe the genetic and molecular bases of stress responses in plants, in order to decipher and predict adaptive processes involved in the interactions of plants with their environment
• “Functioning of communities in interactions within agro-ecosystems to propose new plant protection and crop system methods”: to decipher the functioning of agrosystems by studying epidemic dynamics in order to support the design of new performing production systems for sustainable agriculture, integrating empirical innovations from farmers

IGEPP’s specificities are:

• Expertise on the complexity of agro-ecosystem ecology thanks to the integration of plant genetics and pathogens/pests ecology using a combination of different crops
• Interface-type expertise thanks to dialogs between disciplines such as:
  • Genetics, cytogenetics, genomics and bioinformatics
  • Plant pathology
  • Ecology, epidemiology, evolutionary biology and modelling
  • Physiology and biochemistry