Laurent Penet

French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment (INRAE) | INRAE · Department of Plant Health and Environment

Loss of varietal diversity is a worldwide challenge to crop species at risk for genetic erosion, while the loss of biological resources may hinder future breeding objectives. Loss of varieties has been mostly investigated in traditional agricultural systems where variety numbers are dramatically high, or for most economically important crop species...

Diapherodes hennemanni n. sp. was discovered in Jamaica in 2018 and is here described in both sexes and egg. It is compared with the two other known species of the genus in Jamaica.

The transition toward sustainable agriculture requires rethinking cropping systems in the light of less intensive and chemically reliant practices. Weed management is one of the target practices to evolve cropping systems with decreased impact on the environment. While softened management will lead to increased weeds/crops coexistence, it is of imp...

The egg and the adult female of Paraprisopus apterus Conle, Hennemann, Bellanger, Lelong, Jourdan & Valero, 2020, from French Guiana, are described here for the first time. Ant-mimicking morphology and behaviour of post-hatch Paraprisopus nymphs are reported and discussed.

Landscape effects might impede or increase spore dispersal and disease risk for crops, as trees and hedges buffer winds and can behave as spore traps, therefore limiting diffusion of fungi, or, on the contrary, behave as disease relay once vegetation is infected and become inoculum sources. In this study, we investigated weekly prevalence of the pa...

This review summarizes and reports new records for stick insects from Guadeloupe archipelago, based on inventories conducted both in Guadeloupe and island dependencies (La Désirade, Marie-Galante, Les Saintes and Petite Terre). The distribution range of the endemic species Bacteria donskoffi (Lelong & Langlois, 1998) and Clonistria guadeloupensis R...

Colletotrichum gloeosporioides is a species complex of agricultural importance as it causes anthracnose disease on many crop species worldwide, and strong impact regionally on Water Yam (Dioscorea alata) in the Caribbean. In this study, we conducted a genetic analysis of the fungi complex in three islands of the Lesser Antilles—Guadeloupe (Basse Te...

A new genus of stick insect from Jamaica is described, Jamanistria n. gen., which includes three species previously assigned to the genus Clonistria Stål, 1875, and one new species discovered by the authors in 2018, J. xerophila n. sp., described in both sexes and the egg. The previously unknown female and egg of Jamanistria annulipes (Rehn & Hebar...

The geographical origin of Caribbiopheromera jamaicana Zompro, 2001, is discussed and called into question, while Clonistria caputaurata Bellanger et al., 2012, is synonymised with Bostra trinitatis Werner, 1929, which is transferred to the genus Clonistria Stål, 1875.

Crop pathogenic fungi may originate from reservoir pools including wild vegetation surrounding fields, and it is thus important to characterize any potential source of pathogens. We therefore investigated natural vegetation's potential for hosting a widespread pathogenic group, Colletotrichum gloeosporioides species complex. We stratified sampling...

Fungal microbial communities in plant hosts, or the mycobiome, are critical to key agriculture functions for increasing plant growth and improving disease management. In this chapter, the fungal microbiome is explored for its use as a tool in disease diagnosis, agroecology, and disease management in modern agriculture. Molecular markers and specifi...

Ecological interactions are a fairly overlooked component in agriculture, despite their known potential in productivity, pest and disease regulation. In this study we assessed whether a potential low pathogenic congeneric competitor of Colletotrichum gloeosporioides could decrease disease onset in yams. We set an experiment with artificial drop ino...

Crop diseases are often considered as episodic events associated with specific environmental and weather conditions, but little is known about disease development when conditions for epidemics are sustained in time, as often occurs in the tropics. Colletotrichum gloeosporioides (anthracnose) presence on guava trees was monitored for 45 weeks. Resul...

Current Use of Local Folk Medicine (Rimèd Razyé) in the French Lesser Antilles: Diversity Patterns and Links Between Food and Health. Folk medicine is an important component of culture, often with regional implications. In recent decades, renewed worldwide interest in the subject has developed. In this study, we investigated current use and forms o...

Guadeloupe, like many Caribbean countries, is very dependent on food imports. One of the alternatives would be to gain a better understanding of the richness of our agricultural resources in order to better domesticate them and make use of them in our food, our culture and our landscapes. Agrodiversity can take various forms - type, number, arrange...

Colletotrichum gloeosporioides is a species complex of fungi belonging to the Glomerellaceae family (Ascomycota). It has a global worldwide occurrence and while sometimes described as a plant endophytic commensal, it also often demonstrates pathogenicity on crops and is responsible for anthracnose disease in many cultivated species. Thirty-nine pol...

Yams (Dioscorea sp.) are staple food crops for millions of people in tropical and subtropical regions. Dioscorea alata, also known as greater yam, is one of the major cultivated species and most widely distributed throughout the tropics. Despite its economic and cultural importance, very little is known about its origin, diversity and genetics. As...

Details of accessions with their accession code, geographical origin, local name, ploidy level and accession type included in the study. Identified groups based on PcoA and UPGMA analysis are also indicated. (XLSX)

Colletotrichum gloeosporioides is a species complex of fungi belonging to the Glomerellaceae family (Ascomycota). It has a global worldwide occurrence and while sometimes described as a plant endophytic commensal, it also often demonstrates pathogenicity on crops and is responsible for anthracnose disease in many cultivated species. Thirty-nine pol...

Disease perception and adequate management practices are two essential issues faced by farmers, especially in the current context of climate change which may potentially increase disease risk. We investigated the diversity of water yam cropping systems in Guadeloupe through interviews, how producers and international yam research scientists perceiv...

Plant pathogens have evolved many dispersal mechanisms, using biotic or abiotic vectors or a combination of the two. Rain splash dispersal is known from a variety of fungi, and can be an efficient driver of crop epidemics, with infectious strains propagating rapidly among often genetically homogenous neighboring plants. Splashing is nevertheless a...

The fungus Colletotrichum gloeosporioides is responsible for yam anthracnose, the main disease of Dioscorea alata crops. When epidemics occur, C. gloeosporioides is dispersed locally via rain splashing. Splashing is nevertheless a very local dispersal process and most spores are expected to land within a few decimeters after dispersal. In this stud...

Grazing resistance in plants, which can be defined as the ability to grow and reproduce under grazed conditions, is either associated to defoliation avoidance or tolerance. Clonal traits are often neglected when studying functional responses to grazing, despite frequent occurrence in grassland vegetation. We investigated whether clonal traits and r...

Attracting pollinators and achieving successful reproduction is essential to flowering plant species, which evolved different strategies to cope with unpredictable pollination service. The ability of selfing is most widespread and represents a reproductive insurance under varying conditions. In this study, we investigated reproductive success in Ce...

Angiosperm microspores are grouped into tetrads before they mature into functional pollen grains. This tetrad stage is an important step in microsporogenesis. Tetrad shapes are diverse across angiosperms, with high levels of variation sometimes occurring within species, reflecting variation in early developmental events of nuclear and cell division...

Predominantly outcrossing plant species are expected to accumulate recessive deleterious mutations, which can be purged when in a homozygous state following selfing. Individuals may vary in their genetic load because of different selfing histories, which could lead to differences in inbreeding depression among families. Lineage-dependent inbreeding...

Florivores are antagonists that damage flowers, and have direct negative effects on flowering and pollination of the attacked plants. While florivory has mainly been studied for its consequences on seed production or siring success, little is known about its impact on mating systems. Damage to flowers can alter pollinator attraction to the plant an...

This paper presents the first broad overview of three main features of microsporogenesis (male meiosis) in angiosperms: cytokinesis (cell division), intersporal wall formation, and tetrad form. A phylogenetic comparative approach was used to test for correlated evolution among these characters and to make hypotheses about evolutionary trends in mic...

Developmental constraints have been proposed to interfere with natural selection in limiting the available set of potential adaptations. Whereas this concept has long been debated on theoretical grounds, it has been investigated empirically only in a few studies. In this article, we evaluate the importance of developmental constraints during micros...

Gender-dimorphic plants are often subject to sex-differential enemy attack, but whether and how this contributes to trait evolution is unknown. To address this gap, we documented the spatiotemporal prevalence of sex-biased weevil damage in a gynodioecious strawberry. We then conducted path analysis to evaluate the direct and indirect pathways for w...

Although the pollen grains produced in monocots are predominantly monosulcate (or monoporate), other aperture types are also found within this taxonomic group, such as the trichotomosulcate, inaperturate, zonaperturate, di-, or triaperturate types. The aperture pattern is determined during the young-tetrad stage of pollen development and it is know...

The aperture pattern of pollen grains is a character defined as the number, shape, and position of apertures. Although this character is highly variable in angiosperms, two states are particularly wide- spread. Pollen grains with one polar aperture occur frequently in basal angiosperms and monocots while tricolpate pollen is a synapomorphy of the e...

Early developmental events in microsporogenesis are known to play a role in pollen morphology: variation in cytokinesis type, cell wall formation, tetrad shape and aperture polarity are responsible for pollen aperture patterning. Despite the existence of other morphologies, monosulcate pollen is one of the most common aperture types in monocots, an...

Occurrence of intervarietal or interspecific natural crosses has been reported for many crop plants in traditional farming systems, underlining the potential importance of this source of genetic exchange for the dynamics of genetic diversity of crop plants. In this study, we use microsatellite loci to investigate the role of volunteer seedlings (pl...