Team leaders
Address Laboratoire Physiologie Cellulaire & Végétale
CEA-Grenoble
17 avenue des Martyrs
38 054 Grenoble cedex 9
France
Members of the team
Claude Alban, INRAE Researcher
Camille Beaulier, PhD Student
Jacques Bourguignon, CEA Researcher
Chérif Chetouhi, CEA Researcher
Fabienne Devime, INRAE Assistant Engineer
Sylvie Figuet, INRAE Technician (50%)
Adrien Galeone, CEA Technician
Jacqueline Martin-Laffon, CNRS Research Engineer (30%)
Camille Raillon, CEA Researcher
Stéphane Ravanel, INRAE Researcher
Manon Sarthou, PhD Student
Presentation
Contamination of soil and water by heavy metals (HM) represents a major environmental hazard to human health. Soil pollution by HM currently affects about 235 million hectares. Understanding how plants respond to HM is crucial in the quest to improve plant capacity to resist to HM pollution. Inside the plant, different processes contribute to enhance metal tolerance; including extracellular immobilization (cell wall and other carbohydrates), active exclusion into the apoplast, chelation in the cytosol and sequestration into the vacuoles.
Therefore, a better comprehension of the molecular mechanisms controlling these processes, as well as understanding metal toxicity and accumulation in plants, is of prime importance to design new strategies of phytoremediation
via engineered plants or natural hyperaccumulators but also for phytomining and food crop biofortification. This is also very important for the selection of crops with low HM contents, or from an ecotoxicological point of view, for example to identify biomarkers of pollution.
We are interested in evaluating the impact of HM stresses on cell function and elucidating the biochemical and physiological defense mechanisms adopted by plants to counter these stresses.
Keywords
Heavy metal stress, heavy metal detoxification, cadmium, cesium, RMN, ICP-MS, proteomics, metabolomics, transcriptomics, vacuole, selenium binding protein, Arabidopsis, plant cells and algae cultures, uranium, phytoremediation, MeP pathway, light stress, phosphate deficiency)