During the first half of the project, we first worked on the role that scaling relationships play in the integration of phenotypic traits across organizational scales. In an opinion paper (Vasseur et al., 2022), we advocate that modelling scaling relationships from genome to whole-plant traits is the key for unravelling phenotypic integration in both plants and animals. Moreover, we explored the consequences of allometric scaling in crop plants, and highlighted how modelling allometry may help crop breeding and predictive modelling (Westgeest et al., submitted). In addition, we reanalyzed previously published datasets to evaluate the magnitude of genetic variability and plasticity on allometric relationships. Interestingly, we found a much larger effect of genetic variability than plasticity (Vasseur et al., 2023), suggesting that local adaptation favors the selection of specific allometries that weakly respond to environmental variations. During this period, we also launched an ambitious experiment on sorghum and maize with more than 14,000 plants individually phenotyped for traits at the molecular, foliar, and whole-plant levels. Traits are currently measured and first analyses of this massive dataset will be performed in 2024.
We also examined the effect of plant-plant interactions, as it occurs in the field, on plant response to herbivores. Interestingly, we found that some genotypes, when interacting, have a repellent effect on herbivores, while other genotypes exhibit the opposite trend: they tend to attract herbivores when interacting with each other (Estaragues et al., 2023). This suggests that complex interactions can occur within plant communities and cultivated field, with unpredictable effect on pests and herbivores. Finally, as part of the databasing task of WP1, we gathered trait measurements on a large collection of A. thaliana genotypes that we made public through a data paper (Przybylska et al., 2023). We are currently developing a similar trait database for plant crops (Vaillant et al., in prep.).
