Hervé Vaucheret: the passion of the unexplained

Explore the unexpected

This discovery launched efforts to understand self and nonself recognition mechanisms in plants

"When I started my biology studies, we knew that plants were sometimes able to overcome a viral infection, but we didn't know the mechanisms underlying this process. My team's work helped identify one of these mechanisms – by chance, because I was working on a completely different subject," summarizes Hervé Vaucheret. Studying unexpected results like these has allowed Hervé to make remarkable advances during a career that includes 135 publications, over 28,000 quotations, and numerous scientific awards.

While completing his thesis in the 1980s, Hervé observed that when he inserted a transgene into a plant to study its expression, this transgene was sometimes ‘silenced’, gradually, as if a silencing factor spread from a given point through the plant tissues. This spatial spread was reminiscent of plants spontaneously recovering from virus infection, a phenomenon first described in 1928.

This comparison suggested that plants "switch off" viruses in the same way they sometimes turn off transgenes.

A few years later, Hervé Vaucheret's team confirmed this hypothesis by showing that a plant in which gene silencing mechanisms are inhibited is unable to resist a virus.

This discovery launched efforts to understand self and nonself recognition mechanisms in plants. Little by little, Hervé Vaucheret's research uncovered the unknown: how a plant defends itself against genes perceived as intruders, but also how it corrects functional anomalies in its own genome and regulates driving factors of evolution such as gene duplication and transposable element ‘jumping’. These mechanisms are found in other organisms such as invertebrate animals, fungi and ciliates.

Trust, the driving force behind research

Researchers give their best in a climate of trust, not scrutiny

When an unexpected result is observed, one can choose to ignore it and classify it as an artifact linked to the testing environment. Alternatively, others can take another look, to find out what it means. Hervé tends to dig, and has done so with determination, characterizing thousands of transgenic plants to test the reproducibility of silencing. "I’ve been very fortunate to work with research directors who trusted me. I am particularly grateful to Jean-Pierre Bourgin and Michel Caboche. Michel encouraged me to be independent and sponsored my participation in the first European project on gene silencing in 1993, with only six laboratories involved.”

“Jean-Pierre Bourgin, whose name graces one of the Institute’s joint research units (the IJPB¹), has instilled a philosophy of trust and resource sharing between teams, which is, in my opinion, the best way to drive research. This collaborative approach makes it possible to absorb the variations in funding that I, like others, have faced. In France, research is managed in such a way that we are asked to program everything without knowing what funding or what teams we will have in the future. By pooling resources at the IJPB, we can develop fundamental research programmes while taking risks.”

“But long-term research programs only make sense if they are sustainable. And for that, it is absolutely essential to preserve a research system based on teams involving several permanent staff.”

Useful research and knowledge sharing

Initially, Hervé Vaucheret planned to work in oncology for its major importance in public health. He chose plants for the freedom it offered, both for his work and from the ethical issues involved in using animal models.

"Research is always fun – but when you find, that’s where the problems begin!” Hervé uses humor to express the difficulty of reporting his results, especially to a non-scientific audience. On the subject of popularization, he likes to quote Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited: “We must simplify, but not to the point of falsification… concentrate upon the essentials of a situation, but without ignoring too many of reality’s qualifying side issues… to tell, not indeed the whole truth…but considerably more than the dangerous quarter-truths and half-truths which have always been the current coin of thought”. Inspired by this standard, Hervé is keenly committed to the sharing of knowledge, which in fact underpins his scientific career. He chose public research above all to advance knowledge and share it as widely and freely as possible.

^{(1) IJPB : Institut Jean-Pierre Bourgin.}

2021 INRAE Awards