bruno Moulia

· My scientific work has been mainly dedicated to the control by the physical environment of plant growth and 3D spatial development, with a special empahsis on biomechanical and mechanobiological processes. My PhD thesis was in mechanical engineering, but I also have a Master Sc in ecophysiology, and another in Computer Sci. I have thus put a special research effort toward a bio-mechanical approach of the morphogenesis of plant, including works on leaf and stem display and on the process of mechanosensing and its relevance to adaptation to wind and gravity . This is due both to the conviction that solid and fluid mechanics are very helpful when studying the shaping of plant organs and the relationships between structures and functions, and to a personal equal inclination toward physics and plant sciences. But also to the conviction that physical, ecophysiological and molecular biology have to be combined together, through a continuous interplay between i) system biology and biophysical modelling and ii) experiments. Major findings from these works involve i) the biomechanical analysis of leaf rolling and unrolling in grasses and the importance of morpho-structural aspects in driving rolling phenotypic variability, ii) system analysis of mechanosensing in various organisms, and the demonstration that strain-sensing rather than stress-sensing was involved in the process of mechanoperception in plants, iii) the validation of an integrative model of mechanosensitive control over tree growth using quantitative expression of primary mechanosensitive genes, and iv) the recent discovery of the role of strain-proprioception in the control of active tropic movement, as well v) a novel method for the spatio-temporal analysis of the regulation of quantitative expression of genes in growing tissues. I have also carried on an interest on the architectural development of plant that led my group to define morphogenetic dimensionless numbers that specifies the shaping of plant axes and tree crowns as a function of the environment and the genetics, and on the significance of these traits for agronomy, forestry and plant breeding. This led me to be co-organisator of the first international Interdisciplinary Congress on Plant Biomechanics (Montpellier, FRA, Sept. 94), of a symposium on Plant Biomechanics in the XVI International Botanical Congress (St Louis USA, July 99), and to be the Chaiman of the 7th International Plant Biomechanical Conference, held in August 2012. And in 2013 I acted as guest-editor for a special issue of the Journal of Experimental Botany dedicated to Plant Biomechanics and Mechanobiology. From 2007 to 2017, I have being leading the interdisciplinary research group MECA (8 tenured research scientists and faculties) that investigates the mechanoperceptive and graviperceptive control of plant growth from a physical and biological integrative perspective. And from 2017 to spring-2022 I have being the Director of the joint institute between Inrae and Univ Clermont-Auvergne “Intregrative Physics and physiology of Trees in fluctuating Environments (UMR PIAF)" (approx 70 people). Since then, I am back to a full time research activity.