The Plant Observatory

The Plant Observatory (PO) is a set of resources dedicated to plant phenotyping at multiple levels, operated by the Institute Jean-Pierre Bourgin for Plant Sciences (IJPB), a large research unit affiliated to INRAE and AgroParisTech. It is situated on the Versailles Campus of the INRAE Ile-de-France - Versailles-Saclay research centre.

Purpose

Our goal is to achieve an integrated and high-throughput plant phenotyping combining macroscopic, biochemical, cytological and metabolic approaches. Our platform integrates several existing platforms that already have a long operating experience, i.e. plant imaging and microscopy, plant chemistry and metabolomics, plant protein biochemistry, Phenoscope phenotyping robots, Arabidopsis biological resource center and plant growth facility.

The PO platform is mainly based on the model plants Arabidopsis thaliana and Brachypodium dystachion but also hosts projects on crops (pea, corn, canola, cotton, barley, linseed, camelina, wheat, etc).

Our project has allowed the emergence of a homogeneous, coherent and large facility allowing an integrated plant culture, phenotyping, imaging, biochemical, metabolic and chemical analysis. In addition we integrate and host the Biological Resource Centers for Arabidopsis which provides users with a very high number of ecotypes, mutant or recombinant lines.

The PO platform cooperates with both academic and industrial partners and provides access to state-of-the-art phenotyping and analysis systems as well as experimental facilities. The PO capacities for plant phenotyping are instrumental for both national and international research programs such as ERC starting grants, EU ITNs and numerous ANR (The French National Research Agency) projects. Our expertise in plant culture and phenotyping are integrated with -omics approaches.

Available facilities

3,500 m² of glasshouses (S2 and S3 level, including a quarantine area), 300 m² of growth chambers (S2, S3 and quarantine areas), 100 m² of in vitro growth chambers, 80 m² of lysemeter boxes, 100 m² of seed conservation facilities, 1,400 m² dedicated to plant imaging, biochemical and metabolic analyses.

Services offered

Growing plants

In controlled conditions in greenhouses, growth chambers, quarantine or bio-security S3 level.

Automated phenotyping

Two Phenoscope robots designed to track Arabidopsis during the vegetative stage are currently in operation on the platform, allowing 1,500 individual plants to be tracked in a fully controlled climatic growth chamber. Another Phenoscope coined 'XL' is in the final stages of development and will growth small plants untils seeds or bigger plants for their first few weeks of development.

Propagation, storage and distribution of genetic material

The Versailles Arabidopsis Stock Center (VASC) makes available to the scientific community : a set of 55,000 T-DNA insertion lines built in the Ws (Wassilewskija) background via Agrobacterium tumefaciens in planta transformation with the binary vector pGKB5. Flanking sequences tags (FST) have been identified for each mutant in the collection: 46,236 FSTs are available in the database Flagdb++, as well as SIGnAL and TAIR. More than 600 natural variants from different geographical origins were collected in order to exploit the natural diversity of the species. Every seed batch was genotyped in order to check the conformity of all reference and distribution batches (Simon et al. 2012). The genotyping data, as well as tools that we have developed to verify or determine the identity of accessions, are available on the dedicated web interface ANATool. More than 100 F2 mapping populations are available. They result from crosses between natural accessions, in particular between the 8 accessions of the most reduced core-collection. A panel of epigenetic recombinant inbred lines (epiRILs) was generated with the aim of studying the impact of epigenetic changes such as DNA methylation on phenotypic variation. These epiRILs derive from two parents with little DNA sequence differences, but contrasting DNA methylation profiles.

Plant proteomics

2D gels, purification, crystallization robot.

Plant imaging

Confocal and visible microscopy, in situ hybridization, laser dissection microscopy, electron microscopy, flow cytometry, subcellular localization and dynamics (spinning-disk microscopy) immunolocalization and FISH.

Metabolic profiling

Analysis of primary (amino acids and sugars) and secondary metabolites (cell walls, flavonoids, etc.) by GC-MS, GC-TOF, MALDI-TOF and LC-MS/MS, HPLC determination of lipids and hormones by nanoLC-MS/MS, isotope labeling and isotopic analysis (elemental analysis and IR-MS), in situ analysis (infrared spectroscopy FT-IR and NIRS).

Labels

	Strategic platform CNOC (National committee of the Collective Tools) since 2013.
	Ibisa recognized platform (Infrastructures in biology health and agronomy) since 2012.