Launched in 2020, Quantitative Plant Biology is an open access journal, co-published by Cambridge University Press and The John Innes Centre with the aim of providing an interdisciplinary forum for high quality research on ground-breaking discoveries and predictions in quantitative plant science.

We sat down with Associate Editor Aurélien Tellier to learn more about his background, and hear his thoughts on what this community-driven journal means for the plant science community.

Can you tell us a bit about your background, and what your current research is focused on?
In France there isn’t much possibility to escape mathematics and statistics at university, even in biological studies. While I have always liked mathematics and studied mathematics as part of the Grandes Ecoles study system, I am not a mathematician; I definitely lack the required rigour and stamina. On the other hand, I am not an experimentalist, as I am incapable of doing a PCR or working at the bench for hours. Even though I studied plant sciences and plant pathology, I always rather liked conceptual and theoretical courses, and so I conducted my MSc thesis in the University of Orsay on computer modelling of plant disease. I then went on to do my PhD thesis at the John Innes Centre and am indebted to James Brown for hiring me on a theoretical project fitting my skills and interests. I very much enjoyed the atmosphere of collegiality in James’s lab as well as the breadth of topics he was able to master altogether. I also valued his vision of science as a democratic process in which all lab members should participate and feel included. As life is stochastic, I landed in Munich for a post-doc with Wolfgang Stephan, where I discovered and dived in theoretical population genetics/genomics and stochastic modelling.

My research reconciles these long standing interests in plant sciences, plant pathology, and mathematics. My group is thus a patchwork of members with different profiles and skills and I aim to promote inter-disciplinary cross-talks. This is a challenge as mathematicians and experimentalists do not speak the same language, but I try to facilitate communication and open exchanges to generate new questions at the interface between disciplines. My work combines mathematical modelling, development of statistical tools (for genome data analysis) and experimental work to study 1) host-parasite coevolution, and 2) seed dormancy and its impact on genome evolution.

What has been your biggest challenge/greatest achievement in your career so far?
My two biggest daily challenges are 1) to stay focused as I tend to be interested in many topics related to evolutionary theory or modelling, and 2) to mentor and encourage students and post-docs. In these troubled times, I take pleasure in small achievements such as students taking responsibility for their own project, the excitement when discussing new results, students delivering an excellent thesis or submitting a paper, or an email from a colleague praising the work and quality of my former students. A few years ago, when one of my students published a paper, upon acceptance, a well-respected editor told us that the study was so elegant and simple that he would have liked to have had that idea himself. That made my day….

Why did you decide to become an Associate Editor?
When I was contacted by Richard Morris and Cambridge University Press, it was clear that there is indeed a gap between theory and empirical research in Plant Sciences. Due to my background and interests, I want to contribute to fill this gap. I guess I would like one day as an editor to congratulate a student for a nice paper with an elegant mathematical model and a neat experimental test, and admit that I would have liked to have that idea myself!

How will Quantitative Plant Biology benefit your research field?
My wish is that QPB promotes future generations of scientists to be more interdisciplinary and defines avenues for quantitative research in Plant Sciences. QPB would also serve as a forum to discuss the use of different technologies to tackle quantitative questions, and to bridge the gap between empiricists and theoreticians.

Do you have any advice for authors submitting to Quantitative Plant Biology?
I do feel qualified to advise my peers, but I hope colleagues can use this journal to make new links between mathematics / statistics and experimental work to generate new hypotheses. I look forward to seeing some challenging papers with out of the box theoretical predictions to be proven correct by experiments. During my teaching at university I point out that Evolutionary Genetics owes a lot to mathematicians (Fisher, Wright, Haldane, Kimura) who have shaped the way we think about evolution, way before much was known about the biochemical bases of heredity. It is timely for Plant Sciences to more fully embrace ideas from mathematicians, physicists or quantitative biologists. I wish QPB could also be a journal promoting new challenging and untested theoretical predictions paving the future of the field. Conversely, empiricists should challenge theory with observed but non-understandable patterns in the data.

What excites you about Quantitative Plant Biology?
I look forward to working with such a young and vibrant Editorial team and am excited by the breadth of topics covered in the editorial board. I admit that since joining the team, I have (re)discovered a large set of work by other Associate Editors on mathematical models of cellular processes, plant physiology and development which sadly are sparsely published across many journals. I am thus excited by the potential for synergies to bridge modelling levels across cellular processes, organ or plant physiology and development up to evolution and genomics/epigenomics.

To submit your paper, go to: cambridge.org/qpb and click on ‘submit your article’.

You can also find lots of useful information under the information tab, such as: Instructions for contributors