It is a researcher who flourishes in the middle of corollas, ears of corn and cabbage. Sporty and smiling, Fran\u00e7ois Parcy digs his furrow in the field of floral development, at the University of Grenoble-Alpes (CNRS-CEA-Inrae). His armfuls of experiences and his harvest of discoveries earned him the silver medal of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in 2022.<\/p>\n
But the geneticist also makes his honey by sharing his floral booty with others. \u201cFlowers, everyone loves and admires them. They are privileged objects to talk about science, molecular biology, genetics and evolution, \u201dhe enthuses, a hint of sunshine in his accent. With a lively passion, this great walker takes us back more than two hundred million years, in the footsteps of a little-known saga: that of flowering plants. This thrilling evolutionary adventure inspired him to write a book, The Secret History of Flowers (Editions Humensciences, 2019). Book that has just been adapted into a documentary, The Abominable Mystery of Flowers (co-written by Cl\u00e9ment Champiat and Fran\u00e7ois Tribolet, France 5, 2022, available in replay).<\/p>\n
\u201cFran\u00e7ois is an excellent speaker; more than that, he is a real storyteller, testifies Teva Vernoux, biologist at the CNRS-ENS in Lyon. When he talks about flowers, he captivates not only the general public but also those who know the subject. \u00bb<\/p>\n
Fran\u00e7ois Parcy willingly begins his lectures with verses by Baudelaire: \u201cHappy is he (\u2026) Who hovers over life, and understands without effort \/ The language of flowers and silent things! (The Flowers of Evil, 1857). But it is to better convince us, then, that this poetic language is only a decoy \u2013 an artifice of seduction. It allows the flowers, those flirtatious ones, to dedicate their bait \u2013 shapes, scents and colors \u2013 not to our eyes and our nostrils, but to those of the pollinators, their precious allies, whom they thus attract into their nets. And the researcher lists “the sum of innovations” that have enabled these “champions of adaptation” to supplant their rivals: in addition to their weapons of massive seduction aimed at foraging species, they can bet on “a genome and smaller cells, more efficient photosynthesis…” In return, these slender creatures have conquered the globe, forming more than 90% of current plant species.<\/p>\n
If the determinism of plants leaves little room for free will, human trajectories seem \u2013 a little \u2013 more open. \u201cMy parents stopped their studies very early, so I fall into the category of \u201cclass defectors\u201d, confides Fran\u00e7ois Parcy. The beauty of the French education system is that it does not always reproduce the family pattern. No determinism in the path he followed, really? It should be noted that his mother was a florist \u2013 this cannot be invented\u2026<\/p>\n
He grew up in the countryside, between Dr\u00f4me and Vaucluse, but turned to scientific preparatory classes. While opting, oh so visionary choice, for the Lyc\u00e9e du Parc, in Lyon. A little later, at the Ecole polytechnique, he will delight in biology lessons. “I did my end-of-studies internship in astrophysics, in Munich, and, at the last moment, I did an additional internship at the Institute of Plant Sciences in Gif-sur-Yvette. A revelation that will make him branch off from celestial objects to plant objects. \u201cGetting out of hard science to sow seeds and grind leaves was a breath of fresh air,\u201d he says. I loved statistical physics, but,. He will never regret this “big turn”, even if the complexity of living things will eventually send him back to his equations, with bioinformatics becoming essential.<\/p>\n
“Fran\u00e7ois’ evolving vision has always inspired me,” breathes Teva Vernoux. In fact, “flowers have not always existed”, recalls Fran\u00e7ois Parcy, before giving the floor to a master, Charles Darwin (1809-1882). For the father of the theory of evolution, species evolve in gradual stages. But flowering plants defied his theory: their sudden appearance and diversification, without trace of gradual stages, was, for Darwin, an “abominable mystery.” The expression will inspire generations of researchers.<\/p>\n
“For several years, science has been nibbling away at this ‘abominable mystery’ on all sides,” says Fran\u00e7ois Parcy. His team became interested in a plant “E.T.”, Welwitschia mirabilis. \u201cThis shapeless plant, which can live for two thousand years, grows in the deserts of Namibia and Angola. It belongs to the group of gymnosperms: which appeared on Earth long before flowering plants, three hundred and fifty million years ago, they had invented the seed but not yet the flower. Today represented by conifers, they have separate sexual organs: on one side, male cones, on the other, female cones. It is up to the wind to carry the pollen from the first to the second. Fran\u00e7ois Parcy notes in passing: \u201cIt is not the most effective for fertilization. \u00bb<\/p>\n
What about our vegetable ET? Like conifers, Welwitschia mirabilis has separate male and female cones. But its male cones are an oddity of nature: they contain scattered sterile ovules, “like an abortive attempt to invent a bisexual flower”, laughs the geneticist. His team showed, in 2017, that this plant is equipped with the same gene families as those that govern flower formation, with the same hierarchy. In other words, the ancestors of flowering plants were already equipped with the genetic toolbox that will make it possible, much later, to build part of the flower. “The first flowering plants didn’t have to invent everything. \u00bb<\/p>\n
\u201cThe science of flowers is living a golden age,\u201d rejoices Fran\u00e7ois Parcy. Among its recent breakthroughs, as researchers unearth new plant fossils and revise their theoretical calculations, the dates of the appearance of flowering plants keep getting pushed back. “My book from three years ago is already outdated,” sighs the geneticist. Flowering plants, older than we imagined, took their time to branch out. \u201cTheir appearance and diversification were not so abrupt! \u00bb, Notes Fran\u00e7ois Parcy.<\/p>\n
Because math does not let go so easily those who have tasted it, the polytechnician has returned to it. But by an unexpected detour: cabbage. In July 2021, his team revealed with Inria, in the journal Science, the secret of their spectacular fractal shapes. Their infinitely fragmented architecture results from the thwarted destiny of a bud: “It first begins a floral journey, then it loses its way to behave like a stem”, explains Fran\u00e7ois Parcy. Stem which in turn will attempt to produce a flower, in vain, and so on. This chain reaction is the result of a muted struggle of genetic influences.<\/p>\n
This plant microcosm is therefore far from being a blue flower. But the world of botanical research? \u201cIn France, the plant biology community is very tight-knit,\u201d says Fran\u00e7ois Parcy. Despite everything, he had two “difficult experiences”, two thorns at the foot of this crazy climbing and ski touring family. The first, two years ago, was \u201cthe absolute betrayal\u201d of a colleague working in the United States: \u201cWe had committed to publishing together, but she pulled the rug out from under us. The second followed his work published in 2021 in Science: a “very eminent” Briton and Canadian contacted the editor, accusing the French team of fraud. An attack ultimately unfounded, but which will leave the researcher “sore”. Fortunately, his secret garden – where the “architect genes” of plants grow – still has some nice surprises in store for him…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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