COMBINE (2024-2026)

Climate change already impacts crops, with reductions in yield and quality. The effects of this change are little studied and modelled in vegetable species, making it more difficult to implement appropriate strategies. In particular, it is crucial to understand the interaction between genotypes and the environment, and to attempt to model it. In other species, approaches combining genetic and ecophysiological models have shown promising results. This project proposes to implement an interdisciplinary approach in tomato, combining a model of plant and fruit development with genetic modeling. It is based on greenhouse phenotyping of a wide range of varieties, the use of data already acquired on the same material under various stress conditions, and the simplification of an ecophysiological model already used in various studies. The idea is to identify model parameters with genetic variability and use this variability to simulate the growth of different genotypes under different environmental scenarios. In the long term, this project will enable us to define and build new tomato ideotypes that are more tolerant to abiotic stresses.