Pre doctoral discovery program in plant genetics and breeding for InstitutAgro cesurians

This small project aims to help students attending Montpellier SupAgro to discover the international Agriculture research system of the CGIAR consortium during a gap year between their 2nd and 3rd year (“césure”)The project was built on the exchanges of two master students of Montpellier SupAgro. The exchanges implied two international centers of the CGIAR system, the CIMMYT in Turkey and the CIP in Peru, and two research units affilieated to the Labex Agro, AGAP in Montpellier and UR GAFL Avignon.

Germain Montazeaud was first hosted for two months in the GE2POP team of AGAP under the supervising of Dr. P. Roumet. He was involved in the use of spectral image analysis in the senescence evaluation in the field on experimental plot. He used this skill in the CIMMYT lab in Anakra and transferred the technology to the team of Marta Lopes, head of the CIMMYT genetic unit in Ankara. The program was successful and lead to the publication of one paper in a peer reviewed journal (Field Crops Research).

Henri Desaint was first hosted for two months in the UR GAFL research unit under the supervising of Dr. C. Sauvage. He was involved in the genomic analysis of the Solanaceae genomes and get skilled in bio informatics. He used these skills in CIP for the genomic analysis of a Potato chromosome under the superving of Dr.A. Khan . The program was successful but could have been more efficient if CIP have had better computing equipments.

Communication towards students for the discovery of Agropolis Fondation and the CGIAR system was a important goal if Adanson. This has been fully achieved by the edition of a blog GenNomad :
https://gennomade.wordpress.com/

This Blog revealed to be a very efficient way of communicating within the Adanson project and towards students. It counts today more than 3400 views. Henri and Germain were also offered to communicate their experience to the students seeking internships abroad and especially interested by discovering Agriculture in the developing countries.