Accessit 2023: Dr. Alice Malivert
→ Prize 500 €
The honorable prize for the 2023 SFBD Thesis Prize has been awarded to Dr. Alice Malivert for her thesis entitled “Plant developmental plasticity and mechanical forces: the role of FERONIA”. Alice did her thesis under the supervision of Olivier Hamant in the Plant Reproduction and Development laboratory at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon. Her work was published in PNAS, Current opinion in genetics and development, Current Biology, Plos Biology Methods in Molecular Biology and Nature Plants.
→ About the winner
The PhD research of Alice Malivert consisted in investigating the response of plants to drought, which is of increased interest in the context of our warming planet. For this, Alice Malivert focused on an Arabidopsis thaliana mutant for the FERONIA gene, which shows pleiotropic phenotypes in most of the plant’s organs. Alice Malivert discovered that feronia mutants do not respond well to hydric stress due to excessive mechanical stress in their cell wall. To understand why feronia mutant cells burst under hydric stress, Alice Malivert characterized the mechanical and biochemical properties of their cell wall. Importantly, she performed experiments indicating that FERONIA helps plants deal with mechanical stress independently from microtubules, which were previously known to be involved in this response. Together, the PhD thesis of Alice Malivert beautifully integrate how plants mechanically respond to ecological constraints using a mutant with impaired development.
