Seminar Talks
Seminar Talks take place on Tuesday at 1:00 pm
"From Recognition to Response in Plant Immunity"
October 27, 2026 at 15.30*
Talk by Gitta Coaker, UC Davis
It is a great pleasure to announce the upcoming PlantMicrobe seminar talk to be given by
Gitta Coaker, UC Davis
on Tuesday, October 27th 2026 at 15:30* in person at LMU Munich (Room B01.027) and also via Zoom.
"From Recognition to Response in Plant Immunity"
Professor Gitta Coaker is the John and Joan Fiddyment Endowed Chair in Agriculture at the University of California, Davis, where she has been a faculty member since 2007. Her research focuses on innate immune perception and the spatial regulation of plant defense, with an emphasis on immune receptor activation and engineering. Her work also examines host targets of vascular pathogens, including vector-borne diseases associated with Liberibacter species.
Dr. Coaker is an American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow (2026). She has received several awards, including the William H. Krauss Award for Research Excellence (2004), the NSF CAREER Award (2011), the Chancellor’s Fellow for Research Excellence (2013), the Graduate Student Mentoring Award at UC Davis (2020), and the Noel T. Keen Award for Research Excellence in Molecular Plant Pathology (2022).
The Zoom link will be sent to members via E-Mail.
*Please note the atypical timing at 15.30 - 16.30.
"Systematic discovery of pathogen effector functions across human pathogens and pathways"
November 10, 2026
Talk by Tomas Pachano, Research Institute of Molecular Pathology, Vienna Biocenter
It is a great pleasure to announce the upcoming PlantMicrobe seminar talk to be given by
Tomas Pachano, Research Institute of Molecular Pathology, Vienna Biocenter
on Tuesday, November 10th 2026 at 13:00 in person at ZMBP (Room 2T26 (IFIB)) and also via Zoom.
Pathogens deploy effector proteins to exploit host cell biology, and most effector open reading frames (ORFs) are rapidly evolving and lack functional annotation. We developed the effector ORFeome (eORFeome), a scalable functional genomics platform encompassing 3,835 effector ORFs from diverse viruses, bacteria, and parasites. High-throughput barcoded screens across nuclear factor κB (NF-κB), apoptosis, p53, cGAS-STING, and major histocompatibility complex class I (MHC class I) pathways revealed novel pathway-modulating functions for hundreds of uncharacterized eORFs, unexpected activities of known effectors, and distinct pathway-specific functions encoded by single ORFs. Illustrating the power of this approach, we identified HHV6A U14 as a p53 antagonist, HHV7 U21 as a dual-function STING antagonist and MHC-I antigen display inhibitor, and adenoviral 13.6K/i-leader protein as a de novo-evolved TAP inhibitor that suppresses MHC-I display. These results establish a general framework for systematic effector annotation, uncover new mechanisms of host-pathogen interaction across kingdoms, and highlight pathogen effectors as a versatile toolkit for rewiring and probing human cellular pathways.
The Zoom link will be sent to members via E-Mail.
It is a great pleasure to announce the upcoming PlantMicrobe seminar talk to be given by
Harrold ven den Burg, the University of Amsterdam
on Tuesday, December 15th 2026 at 9:30* in person at ZMBP (Room tba) and also via Zoom.
Abstract tba
* Please note the atypical timing!
The Zoom link will be sent to members via E-Mail.
It is a great pleasure to announce the upcoming PlantMicrobe seminar talk to be given by
Phil Carella, The John Innes Center
on Tuesday, December 15th 2026 at 13:00 in person at ZMBP (Room tba) and also via Zoom.
Abstract tba
The Zoom link will be sent to members via E-Mail.
It is a great pleasure to announce the upcoming PlantMicrobe seminar talk to be given by
David Langenberger, ECSEQ.
Date tba
Abstract tba
The Zoom link will be sent to members via E-Mail.