Guillaume Lobet, professor at the Faculty of Bioengineering, the Earth and Life Institute (UCLouvain) and the Agrosphere Institute (Forschungszentrum Juelich, DE), has received a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council (ERC). The ERC will fund his research into the soil-root-plant system in the context of global climate change over the next five years.
Drought phenomena are becoming more frequent and more intense. Strategies are therefore needed to adapt the dynamics of crop water uptake to these new environmental conditions and thus guarantee food security. One way of doing this is to select plants with root systems that optimise soil water uptake.
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 uptake under drought conditions. 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 capacity 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 outstanding project proposals from scientists between seven and twelve years after obtaining their doctorate. Among the ERC's funding lines, the Consolidator Grant therefore falls between the Starting Grants, which are awarded to young researchers at the start of their careers, and the Advanced Grants for established researchers. Personal grants are considered to be the most prestigious awards in the European research landscape.