Adrien Vial

My name is Adrien Vial. I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Plant Breeding, where my research focuses on understanding plant-to-plant interaction and the impact of intraspecific genetic diversity to obtain resilient crop systems for disease outbreaks and changing environments.

The project focuses on spring wheat in cultivar mixtures (i.e intraspecific diversity). The goal is to provide insight into plant-to-plant interactions of different wheat genotypes and the impact of genetic diversity on the properties of the mixtures.

As different plant traits and genes interact, we hope to describe important characteristics that affect the plant's environment and pathogen communities. By describing the plants at this scale and by studying the wheat genome, we hope to explain some of the variability seen in cultivar mixtures at the field scale.