Maxence Longuemare, council member

About my research

In nature, plants are confronted with a plethora of insect herbivores which have been driving the evolution of plant defences for more than 400 million years. Plants have developed plastic defensive strategies to be resistant or tolerant against their diverse and, sometimes, unpredictable antagonist communities. While our understanding on plant-insect interactions has greatly improved over the past decade, most studies have focused on single or dual herbivore attack which do not capture the complexity of interactions occurring in natural ecosystems. Which growth-defence strategies plants may deploy to defend themselves under situation of attack by multiple herbivorous insects is largely unexplored. The aim of my PhD project is to investigate the plasticity of these defensive strategies within the Brassicaceae family, to understand the evolution of plant defences. Specifically, I explore how plants deal with sequential attack by multiple insects from different feeding guilds, how variation in time and space affects plant defence plasticity and how the different defence strategies vary between related plant species. For this, I am using transcriptomic and metabolic approaches, coupled with phenotypic measures on plant growth, reproduction, and insect performance.