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Raphaël Mercier awarded 2011 Starting Grant from the european Research Council
Meiotic insight: deciphering the engine of heredity
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©
Pierre Maraval
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The European Research Council (ERC) awards grants to support research based solely on the criterion of scientific excellence. Awardees are thus given the possibility of starting their own research team. As a part of the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme for research and development, Raphaël Mercier, a scientist working in the meiosis and recombination research group at the Jean-Pierre Bourgin Institute at INRA Versailles-Grignon, was awarded a Starting Grant through the fourth ERC Starting Grant call. MeioSight, Mercier’s research project investigating meiosis, a key step in reproduction, will receive €1.5M over the next five years.
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Since arriving at INRA in 1998, Mercier has focused his research on meiosis in the model plant species, Arabidopsis thaliana. Meiosis is a special type of cell division that allows for the production of sex cells – known as gametes – in all living things that reproduce sexually, from plants and animals to fungi.
Meiosis is the process of two successive cell divisions that results in four daughter cells – future gametes – that carry only half of each parent’s chromosomes. The resulting chromosomes are a unique recombination of the genes from each parent’s chromosomes. The number of initial chromosomes in an individual is re-established when female and male gametes fuse during fertilization.
Recognising a leading specialist in international research
Mercier is the author of over 20 articles published in peer-review journals and is a leading expert on meiosis, whose high-quality research has been recognised internationally. In 2010, he was invited to participate in conferences on meiosis organised by the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and the Gordon Research Conferences (GFC), and to moderate debates at the Gordon Research Seminar. His five-year MeioSight research project will be launched in 2012 and will shed light on the process of meiosis. The European Research Council was won over by the originality of Mercier’s genetic approach to identifying new genes associated with meiosis and deciphering their functions. It will allow for a better understanding of the key molecular mechanisms at work in this process lying at the heart of heredity.
Driving plant breeding through control of hereditary mechanisms
By capitalising on genetic diversity, Mercier’s work responds to breeders’ calls to create new varieties of “elite” plants that bring together a new set of traits of agronomic interest. To incorporate these traits in one individual, plants with one, or several, beneficial attributes must be crossed – sexual reproduction through meiosis that gives rise to genetic diversity – in order to obtain the necessary, recombined chromosomes. A more precise control of the intensity and the position in the genome of the recombination would therefore be of substantial benefit in plant breeding.
Cultivated plants combine a large number of traits and are often highly genetically complex. Since genetic information is recombined with each generation’s sexual reproduction, not all beneficial attributes are passed on to subsequent generations. To ensure that useful recombinations obtained through breeding are passed on to the next generation, the genetic information must remain stable. The aim would be to reproduce identical cells. To do so, a different type of cellular division normally comes into play, mitosis, which produces exact copies of a mother cell as plants grow. One of the innovative uses of Mercier’s work lies in the possibility of transforming meiosis into mitosis, a process known as apomeiosis. It is one of the mechanisms at work in apomixis – asexual plant reproduction through seeds that produce offspring genetically identical to the parent plant. Apomixis has been observed in over 400 species of wild plants but in almost no cultivated species. Apomictic reproduction would be an effective way to breed new “elite” crop varieties with recombined chromosomes that accumulate traits of agronomic interest. It would notably sidestep the need for complex and burdensome crossing programmes required to maintain hybrid varieties.
A deeper understanding of meiosis has valuable applications not only for agriculture but for medicine as well. An incorrect division of chromosomes during meiosis causes many miscarriages as well as genetic conditions such as Down syndrome. Additionally, chromosome recombination mechanisms are similar to DNA repair mechanisms that take place in all cells and ensure cell integrity.
Find out more:
> Can plants give up sex?, press release 18/02/2012
> MIME, a plant line producing pollen grains and ovules that are genetically identical to the parent plant, press release 05/08/2009
> The control of reproductive mechanisms opens the way for new plant breeding methods, press info item 06/05/2009
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Written by :
Communications Department
Contacts :
Raphaël Mercier, Meiosis and Recombination Team
Unit :
Joint Research Unit 1318 IJPB Institut Jean-Pierre Bourgin
Department :
Plant Breeding and Genetics
Label for the news :
2011 Starting Grant
Date for the news :
2012.02.09
Date of creation : 09/02/2012
Date of last update : 09/02/2012
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