Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Research Visitors

Visits of International Scientists

The team received several visitors from exterior research groups in 2012:

• Farah Ben Naoum, from Sidi Bel Abbes University, Algeria, visited the team last spring for 1 month. She worked with C. Godin on combinatorial algorithms to compress trees.

• Risto Sievanen, from University of Helsinki, visisted the team for 3 months sabbatical leave in spring. He worked in particular with C. Pradal and C. Godin to integrate the model Lignum developed in his group within OpenAlea.

• Philip Benfey, from the University of Duke, USA, visited the group for 1 day at spring. Contacts have been established to exchange students/researchers between the labs for short periods. Julien Diener, working on automated methods for 2D root reconstruction from 2D images, should pay a visit to their lab in 2013.

• Xavier Sirault, from CSIRO and the High Resolution Plant Phenomics Centre in Canberra, Australia, visited the team during one day. It was decided during this visit to launch a project for coupling the phenotyping platform developed in Australia, a similar one developed in Montpellier by the group of F. Tardieu, and OpenAlea. The objective of this project will be to develop an integrated pipeline allowing the thorough analysis of a large number of genotypes, in particular assessment of growths of individual organs, of plant geometry, and of derived variables such as light interception. There is a strong complementarity between the three teams and the combination of expertise brought in the project by the different groups can result in a reference pipeline of model-assisted image analysis for plant phenotyping.

Visits to International Teams

Yann Guédon was invited by Miroslava Rakocevic (IAPAR, Londrina, Parana state) in Brazil during two weeks in september. This visit was funded by an Embrapa project. He visited three research centers: (i) EPAGRI, Caçador, Santa Catarina state; IAPAR, Londrina, Parana state; Embrapa, Campinas, Sao Paulo state. He gave a 8h course about plant architecture analysis at Londrina and gave a talk at Campinas.

Christophe Godin was invited at the Sainsbury Lab in Cambridge. A first collaboration with Henrik Jonsson based on the joint supervision of a post-doc fellow coming from Virtual Plants to Sainsbury was assessed. Other collaboration projects about meristem modeling and imaging were discussed.