Section: Partnerships and Cooperations
National Initiatives
Biocontamination in aircraft reservoirs
ANTICOR is an industrial-academic research and development working group coordinated by Dassault Aviation, investigating the causes of microbial contamination in aircraft reservoirs and aimed at developing mitigating procedures and equipment. Previous results have shown that this contamination forms biofilms at the fuel-water interface and is comprised of complex communities of hundreds of bacterial and fungal species. Pleiade is particularly interested in measuring and modeling these communities, especially as concerns understanding how they change based on environmental conditions and on reservoir geometry.
This working group continues work started in CAER – Alternative Fuels for Aeronautics, a 6 M-Euro contract with the Civil Aviation Directorate (Direction Générale de l'Aviation Civile, DGAC), coordinated by the French Petroleum Institute (Institut français de pétrole-énergies nouvelles, IFPEN) on behalf of a large consortium of industrial (EADS, Dassault, Snecma, Turbomeca, Airbus, Air France, Total) and academic (CNRS, INRA, Inria) partners to explore different technologies for alternative fuels for aviation.
Agence Française pour la Biodiversité
The AFB is a public law agency of the French Ministry of Ecology that supports public policy in the domains of knowledge, preservation, management, and restoration of biodiversity in terrestrial, aquatic, and marine environments. Pleiade is a partner in two AFB projects developed with the former ONEMA:
Inria Projet Lab in silico Algae
In 2017 Pleiade joined the IPL “In silico Algae” coordinated by Olivier Bernard. The IPL addresses challenges in modeling and optimizing microalgae growth for industrial applications. Pleiade worked this year on comparative genomic analysis of genes implicated in lipid production by the picoalgae Ostreococcus tauri, in collaboration with Florence Corellou of the CNRS UMR 5200 (Laboratoire de Biogénèse Membranaire). The goal of this work is the production of long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids, developed as nutritional additives. Mercia Ngoma Komb's two-month internship in Pleiade contributed to this work.