Seminar Talks

It is a great pleasure to announce the upcoming PlantMicrobe seminar talk to be given by

Amey Redkar, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bangalore, India

on Tuesday, May 5 2026 at 13:00 in person at MPI-MP (Room U.019) and also via Zoom.

"Deciphering the compatibility regulatory mechanisms of fungal pathogenesis in systemic infections"

Fungal interactions with plant roots, either beneficial or detrimental, have a crucial impact on agriculture and ecosystems. The cosmopolitan plant pathogen Fusarium oxysporum (Fo) provokes vascular-wilt disease in more than a hundred different crops. On angiosperms (flowering plants), Fo exhibits exquisite adaptation to the plant xylem niche as well as host-specific pathogenicity in form of wilting, both of which are conferred by effectors secreted in xylem (SIX) and encoded on lineage-specific genomic regions. However, such isolates also can colonize the roots of other plants asymptomatically as endophytes or even protect them against pathogenic strains. The molecular determinants of endophytic multi-host compatibility are largely unknown. Moreover, the strategies that enable these pathogens to exploit deeper tissues such as xylem and what led to the emergence of such systemic infections in plants remains elusive. Also, to date, the origin of accessory regions and how these different genomic compartments orchestrate an infection process remains unresolved.

In this talk I will introduce our work on how multi-host compatibility is established in vascular wilts, how the infection process is co-ordinated to lead to diverse interaction outcomes – such as pathogenic and endophytic; and our recent initiatives to define the compatibility regulatory mechanisms both in- and ex-planta to understand these complex interactions of hidden beneath.

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

Heidi Seibold, Digital Research Academy

on Tuesday, May 19th 2026 at 13:00 in person at LMU Martinsried (Room B01.027) and also via Zoom.

"Open Science and Research Software Engineering - Building Blocks for Quality Research"

While we keep celebrating and promoting research excellence, we all know that research and academia are plagued by systemic problems that lead to outputs that fall short of what we would call "excellent". The reproducibility crisis in many fields as well as scientific fraud cases are just the tip of the iceberg. One aim of Open Science is to address these quality issues by promoting transparency, collaboration, and rigorous methods that foster reproducibility and accountability.

In computational fields, the conversation must extend beyond the quality of papers and data to code and software. Practices such as version control, automation, testing, continuous integration, and environment stabilization not only improve code quality but also make the code easier to maintain and to collaborate among increasingly distributed teams.

In this talk, I will explore the intersection of Open Science and Research Software Engineering. I will outline practical strategies and best practices that researchers can adopt to elevate the quality of their code and, by extension, of their research.

Dr. Heidi Seibold did her PhD in Biostatistics (with AI focus) and has a research background at the intersection of Data Science, Reproducibility and Medicine. Later, she turned to provide Open Science training and consulting as a solopreneur, dedicating her professional life to improve the way we do research and advocating meaningful, reproducible and trustworthy science. Her professional pathway led her through LMU, the Universities Zürich and Bielefeld and Helmholz Zentrum München. She is co-executive director of Digital Research Academy, and has been "AI Newcomer of the Year 2021" of the GI. Websites: https://heidiseibold.com, https://digital-research.academy

The Zoom link will be sent to members via E-Mail.