Vincent Vadez: Principal Investigator, Objective 1

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Vincent Vadez

 

 

Educational background

PhD in Plant Physiology – Agronomy Engineer (France)

Role in the TLI project

Principal Investigator of Objective 1 as of June 2008. Activity 4 leader of Objective 1 (groundnut) and have a prominent role in Activity 1 of Objective 1. I’m also closely involved in Activity 1 & 4 of Objective 4 (chickpea).

Scientific interests

My research focuses on plant response to water deficit in mandated crops of ICRISAT, and mostly on groundnut, chickpea, pearl millet and sorghum. My research at ICRISAT focus on traits that are closely related to the yield architecture and that can have a benefit under water limited environments. We focus on transpiration efficiency (TE, i.e. the amount of biomass produced per unit of water transpired) and our goal is to obtain QTL for TE that would then be introgressed into locally adapted germplasm. Challenges related to TE are: (i) explore the genetic diversity for this trait towards the development of suitable mapping populations; (ii) understand the interaction between TE and the environmental conditions; (iii) Assess the potential of introgressing such traits from wild Arachis relative. We focus on water uptake by roots, where our goal is also to obtain QTL for an increased and better patterned water uptake towards yield increase under water limited environments. Our challenges are: (i) to understand the relation between “physical” root traits (depth, length density, volume, etc…) and functional root traits (water uptake, pattern of uptake over time under stress), and their relation to yield; (ii) explore the diversity for these traits; (iii) map QTL for such traits.

Professional affiliation

ICRISAT