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Sebastian is a Gatsby Group Leader and Royal Society University Research Fellow at the Sainsbury Laboratory (SLCU), University of Cambridge. He investigates how plants grow and develop in response to their biotic environment. To this end he studies plant processes which support plant colonisation by microbe and aims to understand how plants and microbes manipulate their relationship to their benefit. His team assesses the overlap between symbiotic mycorrhiza processes and root infection by the biotrophic filamentous pathogen Phytophthora palmivora, a relative of the potato late blight pathogen. They characterize common processes and their relevance for general growth and development. Furthermore, they use host-transferred microbial effector proteins to probe plant processes with shared roles in plant-microbe interactions and development. This work will reveal the intersection between symbiosis and pathogenesis and will provide new insights into plant development driven by biotic cues. Before investigating plant interactions with filamentous microbes, Sebastian studied plant disease resistance genes and Xanthomonas bacteria. He is one of the discoverers of the TAL effector DNA binding code, a basis for TAL effector DNA nucleases.