I am French national living in Taiwan since 2013. I am specialized in plant sciences: I originally studied seed and plant production and then moved to biochemistry and molecular biology. I studied in various universities in France, including Angers, Nantes,  Rennes and Montpellier, and I also spent some of my Bachelor years in the Netherlands at Dronten CAH and Amsterdam VU. I moved to Taiwan for a post-doc after passing my PhD in Montpellier, and obtained a position at National Taiwan University in 2020. 

As sessile organisms, plants cannot move to escape adverse conditions. They instead attempt to modify their immediate environment by secreting metabolites. A typical example of this lies in the nutrition in essential trace metal elements such as iron, zinc and copper. While these elements are generally present in sufficient amount in soils, their solubility is low, causing problems of deficiencies that are deleterious for crop yield. As an adaptation, plants evolved to secrete molecules that can enhance the bioavailability of these elements, in particular iron. The ability of plants to efficiently acquire iron at high pH is the major determinant of their calcicole behavior. Interestingly, the inability to grow in such conditions can be rescued by the presence of a calcicole neighboring plant, demonstrating that in these iron-scarce conditions, plants collaborate rather than compete. We are interested in understanding the physiological and biochemical effect of root-secreted molecules, a small subset of the hundreds thousands metabolites produced by plants.