Guillaume Lobet:
Virtual Phenotyping pipeline for the evaluation of Root hydraulic properties of in silico maize landraces

Guillaume Lobet is an Assistant Professor between the Forschungszentrum Jülich and the UCLouvain. The aim of Guillaume’s research is (i) to understand how various signals that carry information are interacting and being conveyed and integrated at the plant level and (ii) to amplify discrete physiological knowledge into functional plant processes. All of that using Functional Structural Plant Models. He his also passionate about Open Science and always tries to share his research outputs as widely as possible (for instance here : www.botalgorithme.be)

We present our recent advance on our understanding of the influence of hydraulic anatomy root traits on water uptake dynamics, at different scales and for specific soil and environmental constraints.

We created a new computational pipeline to estimate  the influence of hydraulic anatomy root traits on water uptake dynamics, at different scales and for specific soil and environmental constraints. We used our novel pipeline to analyze the water uptake dynamics of eight Mexican maize landraces, both in their environment of origin and in the environment of the other lines. Our analysis highlighted a tradeoff between water uptake performance (total amount of water extracted) and efficiency (amount of water per carbon invested within the root system). It also helped us identify possible GxE interactions. These exploratory findings inform us of potentially beneficial sets of traits which could be investigated in future studies.

Adrien Heymans, Chloe McLaughlin, Ruaridth Sawers and Guillaume Lobet