EVAg

The French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health & Safety (ANSES) conducts missions in the areas of surveillance, expert appraisal, research and reference in a wide range of fields including human health, animal health and well being, and plant health. ANSES is participating in the project through Plant Health Laboratory (LSV).

The Plant Health Laboratory missions cover biological and other risks related to plant health for cultivated land and forests, and includes invasive plants and identification of prohibited genetically modified organisms. It is also involved in quarantine of imported plants and those introduced via waiver procedures. Within its fields of expertise, the laboratory assists the Agency in fulfilling its mission with respect to reference, research, surveillance, epidemiology and scientific and technical expert appraisal activities.

Like the other laboratories of the Agency, the Plant Health Laboratory is the analytical reference and scientific and technical support body for the competent ministries in terms of risks to plant health. In addition, it coordinates assessment of biological risks related to plant health.

LSV has 80 staff members, specialists in diagnostics, experts in bacteriology, virology, mycology, nematology, entomology and invasive plants, especially for quarantine pests. The laboratory covers all fields related to plant health: development and validation of analytical methods, identification of plant pests and expert appraisals on invasive plant species on cultivated land. In three domains, the LSV has recently been designated as European reference laboratory (EURL) inmycology, nematology and insects and mites. As national reference laboratory in virology, the LSV proposes methods for official adoption by the Ministry of Agriculture, and coordinates revision of analytical protocols. The laboratory's work is supported by a network of 19 accredited laboratories responsible for first-line detection analyses. The laboratory is accredited according to the standard ISO17025 to carry out analysis and accredited to the ISO17043 standard to carry out proficiency test.

Related to these main duties, the LSV has develop a research approach on its domain of competency. It has an access to an internal platform dedicated to HTS technology (ANSES Ploufragan) and collaborate with several partners in different project on HTS (Virvalid project, DIVAS COST action), on collection (Euphresco virus collect II) and validation (H2020 Valitest). The LSV researches rely on an extended collection of viruses isolated from fields and partially characterised by PCR and sanger sequencing.