COINDRE Eva

PhD student
in Quantitative Genetics and Plant Ecophysiology

Team: ETAP


 

I am a graduate of the Master's degree in Biology and Agrosciences, specialising in genetics, genomics and plant improvement at the University of Rennes 1 in 2021. I did a CDD (2021-2022) at INRAe GAFL in Avignon on the study of the determinism of late flowering in the almond tree.
Since November 2022, I am a PhD student in two teams of INRAe LEPSE and AGAP Institut DAAV. The subject of my thesis is the analysis of the variability and genetic determinism of water and carbon functioning in grapevines under water deficit conditions.

Start of the thesis : 01.11.2022

Subject: "Analysis of the genetic variability and determinism of water functioning and carbon metabolism under soil water deficit in grapevine"

Abstract
In the context of climate change, with an increase of temperature and a rarefaction of rainfall, the sustainability of grapevine is threatened. Genetic diversity is a potential lever to identify alleles involved in adaptation to abiotic constraints and in turn better adapted varieties. My PhD project aims at understanding the genetic variability and determinism of hydric and carbon functioning at the leaf level in response to water deficit. A diversity panel of 250 genotypes was studied under three hydric condition (Well-Watered, Moderate Water Deficit, Severate Water Deficit) in the PhenoARCH platform in 2022 in order to evaluate the response of grapevine to water deficit for multiple traits. Some were simple to acquire such as SPAD data (correlated with chlorophyll content), Water Content (WC) and Leaf Mass Area (LMA). Looking at the row data distributions, we can already see variability for these traits and a difference between water conditions. Other traits are destructive or take time to phenotype. To tackle this issue, a subset of 120 plants was chosen to be phenotyped with low throughput devices while the entire panel was phenotyped at high-throughput using NIRs (Near-InfraRed spectroscopy) and a porometer/fluorometer. Prediction models will be built to predict the traits of interest on the whole panel, and study their genetic variability in response to the water scenario applied. The genetic analysis will involve an association study between genotype and phenotype to identify QTLs (Quantitative Traits Loci) involved in water and carbon functioning. The identification of extreme alleles will further be studied in the vineyard in order to validate their effect and potential for grapevine adaptation to water deficit.

Keywords: genome-wide association genetics, ecophysiology, water deficit, high-throughput phenotyping, grapevine.

Supervisors 
UMR LEPSE, ETAP team: Aude COUPEL-LEDRU (thesis co-supervisor) et Benoît PALLAS (thesis co-supervisor)
AGAP Institut, DAAV Team : Vincent SEGURA (thesis advisro)

Publications

Coindre E, Boulord R, Chir L, Freitas V, Ryckewaert M, Laisné T, Bouckenooghe V, Lis M, Cabrera-Bosquet L, Doligez A, Simonneau T, Pallas B, Coupel-Ledru A, Segura V (2025) Robustness of high-throughput prediction of leaf ecophysiological traits using near infra-red spectroscopy and poro-fluorometry. bioRxiv, 2025.02.07.636194; doi: 10.1101/2025.02.07.636194.

Chir L, Boulord R, Coindre E, Segura V, Saurin N, Doligez A, Pallas B, Simonneau T, Coupel-Ledru A (2025) Genetic variability of leaf temperature and underlying morpho-physiological traits in a grapevine diversity panel. Journal of Experimental Botany, in press