Program > Browse abstracts by author > Hinsinger Damien

In the current context, adapting crops to climate change is a major objective for agriculture. For several years, we have been witnessing an acceleration in climate change in Europe and around the world. Crops will have to cope with increasingly frequent episodes of intense heat and drought, leading to water restrictions. Varieties planted in orchards today will have to cope with conditions they have never faced before, and which will potentially have major consequences, even their survival. Very few genes involved in tolerance to abiotic stresses are known in perennial species. In addition, it is becoming essential to find alternatives for adapting current varieties to future climatic conditions. Recently, Transposable Elements (TEs), mobile DNA sequences playing an important role in genome evolution and in regulating the expression of genes located nearby, have been linked to the adaptation of plants to their environment. Our project will use 2 original approaches to study the impact of TEs on apple breeding : 1) To adapt to apple trees a method for accelerating the natural process of TE neoinsertion via the combined application of a drug and abiotic stress. Epi/genetic modifications generated by this method would enable us firstly to validate the primordial role of TEs in the adaptation of this species to climate change, and secondly to obtain genotypes potentially better adapted to the applied stress and 2) To study the ongoing natural epi/genetic adaptation of Golden Delicious, a model of apple tree variety, adapted for decades to extreme and contrasting environments. These two approaches will then enable us to identify "marker" genes or alleles whose altered expression levels lead to increased tolerance to applied abiotic stresses. These data can then be tested in Marker-Assisted Selection in collaboration with breeders to obtain varieties that are better adapted to their environments.