Hi, I’m Chloé! I am a PhD student in plant biology at Université Paris-Saclay, working jointly at the Institut Jean-Pierre Bourgin (IJPB) of INRAE in Versailles, and at the Plant Health Laboratory of ANSES. At IJPB, I work in two teams: DNA Repair and Genome Engineering (DRAGON) and Strigolactones and Allelochemicals Signaling (SAS).

PhD project

Editing of strigolactone biosynthesis genes in pea for the modulation of rhizospheric interactions and assessment of associated risks, started in September 2024 under the supervision of Fabien Nogué, Alexandre de Saint Germain and Julie Mallet.

Research interests

My current research focuses on pea (Pisum sativum). My main interests are:

• Genome editing: developing and applying CRISPR-Cas9 tools in pea, a legume crop that has long been difficult to edit (Soulard et al., 2025).
• Strigolactone biosynthesis: understanding how pea produces strigolactones, plant hormones that shape plant architecture and act as signals in the soil.

Background

I trained as an engineer at the Université de Technologie de Compiègne (UTC), including an exchange semester at TU Braunschweig in Germany. During my studies, I did a research internship at the ECOBIO lab in Rennes with Céline Roose-Amsaleg, on the inhibition of sewage sludge anaerobic digestion by propionic acid. I then joined IJPB for a second internship with Fabien Nogué and Pierre-François Perroud, on the cell-cycle regulation of Cas9 activity to improve homology-directed repair in the moss Physcomitrium patens, before starting my PhD.

Skills

Molecular biology

• GoldenBraid cloning
• CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing (from guide design to a characterized edited line)
• Stable transformation of Pisum sativum
• Transient and stable transformation of Physcomitrium patens (protoplasts)
• DNA extraction, PCR and Sanger sequencing

Bioinformatics

• Nanopore long-read sequencing analysis
• Variant analysis
• 16S rRNA sequencing analysis

Informatics

• Python, R, HTML and Bash
• Snakemake for pipelines
• Database structure (the basics, but enough for something simple!)
• Data analysis (the basics too, from linear regression and PCA to machine learning)

Analytical chemistry

• Strigolactone extraction from exudates and tissues (concentration and chromatography before LC-MS/MS)