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Mail: marta.zaffaroni@inrae.fr

ORCID / Linkedin

Projet de recherche

Resistance genes diversification strategies to manage plant pathogens in agro-ecosystems: theoretical approaches and application to French vineyard landscapes

• Co-encadrement: Frédéric Fabre (UMR SAVE), Adeline Alonso Ugaglia (Bordeaux Sciences Agro), Loup Rimbaud (UR PV) et Julien Papaïx (UR BioSP).
• Financement : Projet MÉDÉE, Ecophyto (https://agriculture.gouv.fr/ecophyto)
• Période : 2021-2022

Description du projet

The deployment of resistant cultivars in agricultural landscapes is an effective way to protect crops from plant pathogens. However, pathogens have the ability to evolve and overcome such resistances. This often occurs quickly after resistance is deployed in the field, resulting in significant crop losses and increasing pesticide use. How resistance is deployed spatially and temporally can impact on the rates of pathogen evolution and resistance breakdown. Resistance genes can be combined in the same plant cultivar (pyramiding), in different plants of the same field (mixtures) or different fields (mosaics), or they can be deployed periodically (rotations). Many questions remain open: Which strategy choosing? At what spatial scale? Do these choices depend on the characteristics of the pathogen and its host plant?

The main objective of the project is to extend our understanding of the epidemiological and evolutionary outcomes of the main resistance deployment strategies. More specifically, the aim is to assess the influence of pathogens life-history (e.g. form of reproduction) and genetics of interaction with plant resistance on the performance of deployment strategies. The theoretical developments benefits from a mathematical model, implemented in the R package landsepi (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/landsepi/index.html ), which simulates the the spread of epidemics across an agricultural landscape and the evolution of a pathogen in response to the deployment of host resistance. This model will be use as a support for the deployment of downy-mildew resistant vine varieties on the wine-growing territory of the cooperative winery "Nous les vignerons de Buzet".

Formation et expérience

• Novembre 2017- Décembre 2020: doctorante au laboratoire Plantes et Systèmes de culture Horticoles (PSH),  UR 1115 INRAE Centre de recherche PACA – Avignon Université, Avignon (France), avec Daniele Bevacqua.

• Modelling plant-aphid interactions explicitly considering the role of cultural practices: peach (Prunus persica) - greenaphid (Myzus persicae) as study case."

Publications significatives

• Zaffaroni M., L. Rimbaud, L. Mailleret, N. J. Cunniffe, D. Bevacqua (2021). Modelling interference between vectors of non-persistently transmitted plant viruses to identify effective control strategies. PLoS computational biology. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009727
• Zaffaroni M., N. J. Cunniffe, D. Bevacqua, (2020). An ecophysiological model of plant-aphid interactions: the role of nutrient and water availability. Journal of The Royal Society Interface. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2020.0356
• Zaffaroni M., P. Zamberletti, I. F. Creed, F. Accatino, C. De Michele, B. DeVries, (2019). Safeguarding wetlands and their connections within wetlandscapes to improve conservation outcomes for threatened amphibian species. Journal of the American Water Resources Association. https://doi.org/10.1111/1752-1688.12751