Vincent Colot

Vincent Colot is a geneticist by training and has a long-term interest in the study of epigenetic mechanisms and their contribution to the control of genome activity within and across generations. His group recently established a unique population of epigenetic recombinant inbred lines (epiRILs) in the flowering plant Arabidopsis, with the aim of determining the contribution of multigenerational epigenetic variation to the heritability of complex traits, as well as the consequences of loss of DNA methylation on transposable element mobilization. He has a long standing interesting in the role of DNA methylation as a heritable epigenetic mark and his current work is at the interface between epigenetics, population genetics and ecology.

Vincent graduated from the Institut National Agronomique in Paris and carried out his PhD at the former Plant Breeding Institute in Cambridge (UK). He joined the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and established his group in 2001 at the Unité de Recherche en Génomique Végétale (URGV) in Evry. He moved to the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris in 2007. He was elected as a member of EMBO in 2010. He received the Prix Jean-Duvernoy of the Académie d’Agriculture de France (2012) and the Prix Charles-Léopold Mayer of the Académie des Sciences (2013).