TULIP LabEx

The main originality of the TULIP LabEx is to federate multiple research fields in environment sciences in the Midi-Pyrénées region of France. TULIP strengthens the link between communities working on plant biology, agrobiosciences, biodiversity or ecology as well as, in the future, those working on human sciences or environmental economy.

The innovation lies in the fact that it covers all the different fields of biotic interactions, from genes to ecosystems, in natural or human modified ecosystems. Model organisms will be considered as a whole, to allow a better understanding and thus predict their capacity to adapt from the scale of the organism to that of the ecosystem when facing climate change.

Led by Matthieu Arlat from the Plant-Microbes-Environement Interaction Laboratory and Alexis Chaine, from the Theoretical and Experimental Ecology Station, this project associates the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research), INRAE (French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment), the INP-ENSAT (National Institute of Polytechnics of Toulouse), the Paul Sabatier University and the Perpignan Via Domitia University. TULIP has been labelled Laboratory of Excellence "LabEx", which brought significant funding to be on equal footing with its counterparts in other countries, to improve its attractiveness for international researchers and university professors and to build an integrated high-level policy for research, training and industrial valuation.

Key numbers

• 6 laboratories
• 34 research teams involved
• 500 collaborators
• 12 million € over 13 years