Guillaume Lobet, professor at the Faculty of Bioengineering, at the Earth and Life Institute (UCLouvain) and at the Agrosphere Institute (Forschungszentrum Juelich, DE), has received a “Consolidator Grant” funding from the European Research Council (ERC). The ERC will thus finance his research on the soil-root-plant system in the context of global climate changes over the next five years.
Drought phenomena are becoming more frequent and more intense. Therefore, strategies are necessary to adapt the water uptake dynamics of crops and adjust them to these new environmental conditions to ensure food security. One way of doing this is to select plants whose root system optimizes the absorption of water from the soil.
The DROOGHT project (Improving cereal yield predictions under drought: root diameter as a predictor of plant water uptake across scales) aims to identify the main structural characteristics of roots that control the dynamics of plant water absorption in case of drought. The project is based on the main hypothesis that the distribution of root diameter within a cereal root system is an indicator of its structure and functions at the scale of the organ and the field. In other words, there is a link between root diameter and the plant's ability to absorb water. The value of such an indicator lies in its simplicity: diameter is one of the easiest root characteristics to measure, even in the field, under real conditions.
About the ERC Consolidator Grant
With the Consolidator Grants, the European Research Council supports exceptional project proposals from scientists seven to twelve years after obtaining their doctorate. Among the ERC's funding lines, the Consolidator Grant is therefore positioned between the Starting Grants, which are awarded to young researchers at the beginning of their career, and the Advanced Grants for established researchers. Personal grants are considered to be the most prestigious awards in the European research landscape.