Section: Highlights of the Year

Highlights of the Year

• The question of how many and how frequently natural enemies should be introduced into crops to most efficiently fight a pest species is an important issue of integrated pest management, which depends on the pest-natural enemies interaction. Since some natural enemies may exhibit positive predator density dependence in the predation interaction, we studied its impact on the optimal biological control introduction strategies [15].

• Optimal allocation of resources in a bacterium. We studied by techniques of optimal control the optimal allocation between metabolism and gene expression during growth of bacteria, in collaboration with Inria IBIS project-team. We showed that a good suboptimal control solution could be implemented in the cell by ppGpp (a small molecule involved in the regulation of ribosomes) [23].