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We highlighted the impact of water and Alternaria dauci combined stresses on carotenoid content (Perrin et al., 2016; 2017; SA E08-8). These same stress effects have been studied in parallel by medical colleagues on cellular models representative of several human pathologies with positive effects of carrot extracts obtained from plants having undergone biotic stress (Soleti et al., 2020).

When studying, in collaboration with CTIFL, carrot consumer preferences (Navez et al., 2015), we showed that consumer perception of carrots mainly focuses on bitterness and harshness attributes that can be sources of rejection or low preference. Terpenes have been identified as key aroma compounds responsible for harshness or bitterness in carrot, whereas they are also involved in resistance to disease. Nothing was known about the possible transport of these metabolites between leaves and roots, and there was a risk that breeding for a higher level of resistance by selecting carrot varieties with high terpene or polyacetylene contents in leaves could have a negative impact by elevating the perception of bitterness. Through the assessment of colocalisation between rQTLs and the genomic regions involved in bitterness by focusing on monoterpene, sesquiterpene, and polyacetylene compounds within susceptible and resistant genotypes grown in four different environments over three years and using metabolic and sensory analyses, we were able to evaluate the genetic control a ?heritability of most relevant metabolites involved in bitterness. We concluded that it is possible to increase resistance while favouring low bitter varieties by selecting genomic regions involved in the expression of one or the other trait and counter-selecting others when r- and mQTL colocalisation is unfavourable (Le Clerc et al., 2019) as shown on the next figure. This complementarity of approaches has allowed a complete vision of the potential influence of varieties or accessions and production conditions on the quality and health interest of products.