Seminar Details
2013-02-26 (14.00) : Model-assisted integration of genetic and environmental constraints for the improvement of crop water use
At Euler building
Organized by Mathematical Engineering
Speaker :
Xavier Draye (UCL, ELI)
Abstract :
Most crops are heavily dependent on water capture to produce new biomass. In a context of water scarcity, improving water capture has become an obligate step towards meeting an increased demand for agricultural products. Unfortunately, water capture has proven to be amongst the most difficult traits to improve, despite major technological advances in plant biology. Integrating processes operating at different scales while taking into account the spatial and temporal dynamics of water fluxes in the soil-plant-atmosphere system appears to be a major challenge to dissect the components of water capture and, hopefully, develop novel and achievable ideotypes. To address this challenge, a small community of plant scientists has started to develop functional structural plant models that provide an mathematical framework to integrate the incomplete set of experimental data, test hypotheses in silico and, in some cases, to predict crop behavior in complex environments.
The objective of this seminar is to attract the INMA community to these scientific challenges and try to establish new collaborations between our institutes. Similar initiatives have been made in many prestigious universities and the payback is generally clear.