Stéphane Blanc is a Research Director of the Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture et l’Environnement (INRAE). He moved on the Campus of Baillarguet in 2004 where he heads a research group in the Plant Health Institute of Montpellier (PHIM). As a specialist of plant viruses, Stéphane Blanc and his group investigated the interaction between viruses and insect vectors during transmission and virus evolution. More recently, S. Blanc initiated a research program focused on the mysterious biology of multipartite viruses. This program rapidly took off and is now extended to a more general investigation of viral genome segmentation and on the unforeseen properties of multicomponent viral systems.