Catherine Feuillet


Catherine Feuillet is a French geneticist who is the head of trait research at Bayer CropScience and a co-chair of the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium. Feuillet has been working on plant genetics since 1994, when she completed post-doctoral studies at the Swiss Federal Institute for Agroecology. She wrote her thesis on Lignification of Eucalyptus which is the study of how wood is formed on a cellular basis. After that she moved on to the University of Zurich in 1997 where she was a junior group leader investigating fungal disease resistance in plant genomes. In 2008, she and her team successfully published the first mapping of the largest wheat chromosome, 3B and in 2014, they successfully completed mapping 3B's sequencing and published a draft of the entire wheat genome. She has been awarded the Prix Foulon from the French Academy of Science, the gold Trophée de la Femme, was honored as a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, and received the Jean Dufrenoy Prize from the Académie d'Agriculture of France.
Today, Feuillet works as the head of Trait Research at Bayer CropScience, where she is actively trying to decrypt the remaining 20 wheat chromosomes so as to identify and manipulate traits that would help eliminate biotic and abiotic stressors that inhibit the yield of wheat in the changing environment. She is also the head of the project, Breedwheat, which works to manipulate the wheat genome to improve the yield of wheat in the changing environment due to global warming because it is a basic food source for upwards of 2 billion people worldwide.

Education and early life

Catherine Feuillet was born in Orléans, approximately 130 km south of Paris, and attained her education as a geneticist and molecular biologist. In 1993, she earned her doctorate at the Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse, France. Between 1994 and 1997, she completed post-doctoral studies at the Federal Institute for Agroecology in Zürich, studying the genomes of wheat and barley. In 1994 Feuillet finished her thesis on the eucalyptus plant and enzymes used in the wood formation process. She took her thesis to the Swiss Federal Institute for Agroecology in Zürich, Switzerland. She taught two courses as a professor’s assistant and began her work on the wheat genome. At the Swiss Federal Institute for Agroecology she worked in a laboratory under the supervision of Dr. B. Keller to work on structural and evolutionary genomics in wheat and barley. She joined the Institute of Plant Biology at the University of Zurich as a junior group leader and continued her grain research investigating the genes responsible for fungal disease resistance.
In 2011, she joined the Wheat Initiative, created by the G20 countries to improve global wheat production and that same year was awarded a Fellowship by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Feuillet received the Jean Dufrenoy Prize from the Académie d'Agriculture of France in 2012 and in 2013, she joined Bayer CropScience as head of the Trait Research Department. In 2014, her team at IWGSC successfully completed sequencing wheat chromosome 3B and by utilizing a technique called shotgun sequencing they were able to publish a draft of the entire wheat genome sequence. The draft is only 53% accurate and complete mapping will take approximately two more years, provided funding for the project is attained.

Early research and awards

In 2004, she joined the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique in Clermont-Ferrand, France, as the research director of the Genetics, Diversity and Ecophysiology of Cereals Department. In 2005, she joined the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium, an international effort in which she serves as a co-chair whose goal is to sequence the genome of wheat. She was also appointed as the chair of the European Triticeae Genomics Initiative in 2005. In 2008, Feuillet's team published in the journal, Science, the first mapping results of the wheat chromosome 3B, which is the largest of the 21 chromosomes of wheat. That same year, she joined the International Triticeae Mapping Initiative to assist with planning and coordination of research projects. On 24 November 2009 Feuillet received the Prix Foulon from the French Academy of Sciences for her work in deciphering the genome. That same year, she was also awarded the gold Trophée de la Femme for her research and then on 10 September 2010, received the insignia of Chevalier of the Legion of Honour from the INRA.

Wheat genome sequencing

In 2004 Feuillet began her work on the wheat genome, decrypting the chromosome 3B. Decrypting the chromosome took 4 years, but in 2008 she finally finished and presented the chromosome to the scientific community in the journal Science. This required making a map of one of the 42 chromosomes, placing over 1400 molecular markers throughout its 995 million base pairs. The work had never been done before because the sequence was large and had extreme amounts of repetitive sequences, which make it difficult to match the pieces together in the sequence. The wheat genome was also difficult to sequence because of its chromosome arrangement: the plant has three sets of chromosomes in one nucleus, called a hexaploid arrangement. The chromosome she chose to sequence, 3B, is the largest chromosome on the entire genome, and is by itself double the size of the entire rice genome.
In early 2016, the IWGSC announced that they had assembled, using de novo shotgun techniques, a high quality reference sequence of the bread wheat genome. The project was made possible through a collaboration of IPK Gatersleben in Germany, the University of Saskatchewan’s Crop Development Centre in Canada, Kansas State University, and the Global Institute of Food Security in Canada. This “shotgun” approach allows the sequencing to be done very quickly, but it can be rather inaccurate as compared to the “map-based” sequence Feuillet used when she sequenced the 3B chromosome. The shotgun approach is approximated to be 94% accurate, while the rest of the chromosome is about 53% accurate using the second approach. This data from the second approach, released in collaboration with the IWGSC, will be used along with the physical-map based approach to individual chromosomes, including Feuillet’s sequencing of 3B, to produce the full genome by 2017.
Sequencing the wheat genome completely is important for producers all over the world. Wheat currently makes up more than 20% of all calories consumed in the world, and as the global population increases, so does the need for wheat. Recently, however, wheat production has been stagnating because technological advances can’t keep up with negative economic and natural factors. The total demand for wheat is expected to increase by 70 percent by the year 2050—an increase of about 1.6 percent per year. By sequencing the genome, scientists will be able to research ways to improve the efficiency of the crop through means like genetic engineering, which could allow production of wheat in areas with low nutrient levels.

Current research

Feuillet is still continuing her work on sequencing wheat genomes today in order to contribute to the field of agronomy. Her work focuses on genes that would have medicinal advancements that would help prevent illnesses in plants.
To continue her work on the wheat genome Feuillet now heads the project, Breedwheat, which receives 34 million euros annually and has a team of 128 researchers. The project is trying to manipulate wheat to adapt to the changing environment caused by global warming. Because wheat is a necessary and basic food for 30% of the global population, Feuillet found it especially important to ensure the survival of wheat as a food source as the human species influences the global conditions at an ever more rapid pace.
Feuillet currently leads Trait Research at Bayer CropScience and is working on “identifying the genes responsible for yield and resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses.” Since upwards of 2 billion people worldwide rely on wheat a main food source, researchers at Bayer CropScience like Catherine Feuillet, Steve Patterson, and Edward Souza are working on increasing the yield of wheat without increasing the amount of land required for that yield. Feuillet’s work at decoding the wheat genome is essential in increasing the yield because once decoded, the genome could be modified so that yield inhibitors could be abolished. This information is then used by Souza, the Head of Wheat Breeding Research at Bayer CropScience, to develop markers to find the genes that produce the desired trait.