Advances in Botanical Research: Volume 104

Richard Sibout works as a researcher at the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (INRAE) in France. After studying plant biology and forestry, he began his career in a plant laboratory at Versailles (France) under the supervision of Dr. Lise Jouanin and Prof. Catherine Lapierre. Fascinated by science, Richard moved to Canada and obtained a PhD in forest biology from the Université Laval (Québec, Canada) under the scientific direction of Dr. Armand Séguin and Prof. John Mackay in 2005. During his PhD, he mainly focused his research on the last step of monolignol biosynthesis in Arabidopsis thaliana. After a short stay at McGill University in Montreal (Canada), he moved to the University of Lausanne in Switzerland as a postdoc in Prof. Christian Hardtke’s research group. During almost four years, Richard Sibout worked on different projects including root development, photobiology, and plant secondary development. In 2011, he took over the leadership of the “secondary cell wall » research team at the INRAE Laboratory IJPB (Versailles, France) and studied lignin biosynthesis both in Arabidopsis and Brachypodium, a new model for grasses. With the help of his colleagues, he developed a large collection of Brachypodium mutants useful for forward and reverse genetic studies. He established several fruitful international collaborations, including with the Joint Genome Institute (Berkeley, USA) to promote Brachypodium resources. He was also hosted as a visiting researcher at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada) in the Lacey Samuel’s lab from 2015 to 2017.Since February 2018, Richard Sibout is part of the team “Plant Cell Wall and Polymers (PVPP) of the BIA Unit (INRAE, Nantes, France). As a biologist specialized in Brachypodium genomics and in plant cell wall formation, and particularly in lignification mechanisms, he is currently studying the factors responsible for plant biomass composition and structure, in order to understand and improve lignocellulose digestibility for biorefinery and feedstock.