people
Students and other members of the group.
Bureau 1216
911 avenue Agropolis
34394 Montpellier, France
Yann Bourgeois (permanent researcher)
My research has mostly revolved around molecular ecology and evolutionary biology. I am especially interested in using advanced genomic tools to understand the past history of species that are representative of biodiversity, as well as quantifying the link between fitness and genotypes. More recently, I have started developing projects on the population dynamics of transposable elements, which are involved in a strong coevolutionary interaction with their host. I am also involved in several conservation genomics projects in Northern Africa, Spain, and the Mascarenes.
valentin.grenet@ird.fr
911 avenue Agropolis
34394 Montpellier, France
Valentin Grenet (PhD student)
Valentin obtained his Masters degree from Polytech Nice Sophia in 2024. His project consisted in annotating LTR retrotransposons in the date palm reference genome. He has succeeded in obtaining consensus sequences for the most abundant lineages of LTR-RTs, has described their diversity through phylogenetic methods, and has estimated the age of complete LTR-RTs and solo LTRs. During his PhD project, he will contrast the age and abundance of elements with genomic features (recombination, gene density, base content etc.) to investigate the interaction between TEs and their host. Nanopore data will be used to further investigate the abundance and frequency of polymorphic elements.
jasmine.ryan@ird.fr
911 avenue Agropolis
34394 Montpellier, France
Jasmine Ryan (PhD student)
Jasmine obtained her Masters degree from the University of Montpellier (France) in 2025, and is funded by the Agriculture-Environment-Biodiversity Division from the University of Montpellier. Her project will focus on the population genomics of Coffea canephora, the plant used to produce robusta coffee. She will particularly focus on the mutation load and adaptive potential associated with polymorphic transposable elements, and determine how past environmental changes may have shaped current genomic diversity in the species. Her project is co-supervised by Yann Bourgeois, Dr. Christine Meynard , who is an expert in species distribution modeling, Dr. Valérie Poncet and Dr. Rémi Tournebize , both experts in the genomics of Coffea canephora, among other skills!