Section: Highlights of the Year

Highlights of the Year

• Determining ways of preventing the appearance of virulent pathogenic strains that are capable of infecting resistant plants is crucial to the durability of a resistant trait as a crop protection method. Genetic drift could be used in such a way by eliminating initially rare resistant breaking pathogens, but it is necessary to quantify this drift in the considered/developed plant strains to know if it can be of any help. In this work, we developed a method to disentangle the relative role of genetic drift and selection during within-host pathogen evolution, by the development and identification of the parameters of a Wright-Fisher model, based on time-series of the frequencies of the various pathogen variants [31].

• We have proposed a metabolic model [15] of the diauxic growth of microalgae on different substrates. The model, with 172 metabolic reactions is derived using the Drum approach [2]. This model was successfully validated for a broad variety of cases where algae grow under heterotrophic, autotrophic or mixotrophic conditions, and the transient accumulation of metabolites.