IMPACT-M-Net

Plants are vital to human life and health and are essential to mitigate the effects of climate change. Due to their sessile lifestyle, plants have developed the ability to adapt rapidly in response to environmental challenges such as biotic and abiotic stresses. While recent decades have highlighted the central role of epigenetics in these adaptation processes, notably via the composition of chromation, its local organisation into histone variants and its post-translational modifications of histones, recent studies indicate that the spatial organisation (3D) of chromatin in the nucleus and its organisation into chromatin domains are also essential in these adaptation processes. It is then a timely challenge in plant biology to understand how the 3D organisation of chromatin influences the response of plants to environmental challenges, in particular by modifying gene expression. Recent advances in live-cell imaging and super-resolution microscopy offer unique opportunities to observe the dynamics of chromatin organisation in planta and in a cell-specific manner, complementing molecular investigation approaches to decipher long-distance chromatin interactions. However, all these new technologies are complex and require a high level of multidisciplinary expertise, which currently limits the acquisition of significant knowledge in the field of 3D plant genomics. The aim of this proposal is to bring together a group of European laboratories that participated in a previous European COST-Action (CA16212) and wish to extend their network to a multidisciplinary consortium that will combine high- and super-resolution microscopy approaches and 3D image analysis applied to living plant cells. This new consortium wishes to get prepared for the submission of an MSCA doctoral network project (by October 2024) determine the mechanisms by which plants adapt to their environment via the dynamics of the 3D organisation of chromatin, while at the same time proposing to train and motivate a new generation of young PhD students in multidisciplinary and open science approaches. Ultimately, our aim will be to: (i) train this new generation of young scientists in cutting-edge imaging approaches enabling them to address cellular processes with unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution and (ii) provide new open and reusable resources for the plant biology scientific community in terms of imaging protocols, image processing chains and IT tools, particularly deep neural networks for data analysis in open science environments. Collectively, the knowledge gained from this project will contribute to resolving the mechanisms and causality of responses mediated by the 3D genome in the adaptation of plants to their environment.