Our Research Group
Silke comes from Germany, she is a Heisenberg Professor at the Ludwig-Maximilian-University Munich, supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Her research focuses on molecular plant-microbe interactions, having published on immune receptor signaling and trafficking. She holds a doctoral degree in Biochemistry (University of Cologne, Germany) and a Habilitation in Plant Cell Biology (University of Basel, Switzerland). In 2001 she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel, Switzerland. In 2006, she obtained a group leader position at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne, Germany, followed 2009-2018 by her employment at the Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, UK. She is the recipient of an ERC Young Investigator Grant 2012 call, and since January 2021 she is holds an ERC Advanced Grant. Her team now examines how plants interact with vascular pathogens and investigates novel bacterial infection strategies.
Xuanyu comes from China. Her main focus is to investigate the role of MIK2 receptor-like kinases during Xylella fastidiosa infection in olive cultivars. She is also interested in understanding how cultivar-specific immune response are regulated and aim to identify potential microbial ligands for MIK2.
Laura comes from Germany. Her main focus is to determine the role of bacterial extracellular vesicles during the infection process in plants. As a model organism Laura uses the plant pathogen Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato DC3000. For the project several techniques are developed and combined to get a better understanding of the cargo of bacterial EVs in planta.
Jingli Lao comes from China. Her main focus is to investigate the relationship between microbiome and plant disease. She is also interested in bioinformatics, which is a crucial tool for analyze the metagenomics.
Marta is our Technical Assistant. She did her Bachelors in Biotechnology in Spain, where she is from, and she is very passionate about plant-microbe interactions. She supports the research in our team.
Eliana comes from Italy. Her main focus is to investigate the plant immune responses activated in the vascular tissues after Xylella fastidiosa infection. She is also interested in developing novel biosensors to support this investigation.
Kaarthik comes from India. His main focus is to investigate the cell wall integrity sensing mediated immunity in plants against pathogen infection. He is currently developing a pipeline to observe the effect of pathogen-induced cell wall degradation in planta using advanced microscopy techniques and engineering novel reporter lines to parallelly identify key components in the plant’s immune response.
Elif is from Istanbul, Turkey, where she studied Molecular Biology and Genetics before joining our lab as a student helper during her master’s studies at LMU EES. For her doctoral research, she aims to investigate the role of extracellular Hfq and sRNAs in Xylella fastidiosa virulence, and their EV-mediated delivery to host cells. She is also interested in identifying the plant target genes of these sRNAs and exploring how they interact with host immune components, such as dicer-like proteins.
Alessa is originally from Germany and studied Biotechnology in France and the Netherlands. Her main research focus is understanding the role of bacterial extracellular RNA in infection using RNA-sequencing. Furthermore, she is interested in developing RNA-based controls of plant pathogens.
Kasia comes from Poland. Her main research focus is identifying plants´ immune system components involved in Xylella fastidiosa recognition. Using reverse genetic and proteomic approaches in a plant model system Arabidopsis thaliana. She is also interested in optimizing assays to test immune responses in a non-model plant system such as olive.
Constance comes from France. Her main focus is to describe the olive tree immune system, by combining assays investigating classical immune responses and genomic analysis. She is also interested in understanding the olive immune response against Xylella fastidiosa specifically.
Natalie comes from Brazil. Her main focus in our lab is to establish Olive tissue culture, using diverse plant organs like explants. She is also interested in establishing an efficient protocol for Olive genetic transformation, using cells from calli culture, in order to produce plants more resistant to Xylella.
Filipe comes from Portugal. His main focus is to study genetic adaptation of Xylella fastidiosa to the plant environment. To do that he wants to combine transcriptomic and translational analysis with the development of new molecular tools that will enable the visualization of Xylella cells in their natural environment, the xylem vessels of plants.
Zhao Pengfei comes from China, with a primary focus on studying the chitin metabolic pathways in Xylella fastidiosa such as using gene editing and LC-MS. Additionally, he is interested in exploring the differences in chitin metabolism between the subspecies fastidiosa (Xff) and pauca (Xfp).
Alumni
- Dr. Oséias Feitosa-Junior
- Maria Camila Isaza-Alvarez
- Neysa Rodríguez-Murillo