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Contacts : E-Mail karen.jacquot@inrae.fr  -  Linkedin

 Career : Having always had an interest in biology, Karen completed a bachelor's degree in this field. She then chose to pursue a Master's degree in Fundamental and Applied Microbiology at the Université de Bretagne Occidentale. During her studies, she had the opportunity to work on various subjects, including the isolation and characterization of two bacterial strains capable of oxidizing iron, and the characterization of the response of the filamentous fungi Fusarium avenaceum and Fusarium graminearum to water stress. Karen has been a PhD student at the INRAE-MycSA laboratory since the end of 2023, working on the growth and production of mycotoxins by a Meta-Fusarium (a mixture of 7 Fusarium species) from a molecular point of view (epigenetic markers, transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulation).

Thesis topic: Gene regulatory networks and mycotoxin production by a Meta-Fusarium.

Funding: ANR (TeamTox project)

Supervisers : Nadia Ponts and Fabien Dumetz

Summary of thesis project

More than 20 species of filamentous fungi of the genus Fusarium are associated with Fusarium Head Blight in wheat, a devastating disease responsible for major yield losses. What's more, these fungal species are responsible for contaminating grain with mycotoxins, a major health and food safety issue. Seven of these species, including Fusarium graminearum, are found throughout Europe. They can produce one or more mycotoxins, including type A and type B trichothecenes, zearalenone, enniatins and beauvericin.

Until now, research aimed at providing a basis for the development of mycotoxin control strategies has been conducted almost exclusively on a "one pathogen for one disease" basis. This approach has proved insufficient to achieve a comprehensive understanding of mycotoxin infection and accumulation in crops, and to develop effective control strategies. Indeed, the mixture of interacting Fusarium species within a shared niche is likely to result in mycotoxin production with its own regulation, which can only be predicted by considering the mixture as a whole. This project proposes to consider the 7 Fusarium species most frequently encountered on wheat ears as a single meta-pathogen, in order to explore the molecular events (epigenetic, transcriptional, post-transcriptional regulations) in this Meta-Fusarium that lead to mycotoxin contamination of cereals.