Group leader
I was born in a small town surrounded by mountains, like most towns in Chile. Later, I moved to Santiago to study Engineering in Molecular Biotechnology at the University of Chile, where I fell in love with microbiology. After graduating in 2006, I moved to Germany to join Dietmar H. Pieper’s group for my doctoral studies at the TU Braunschweig and Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research. There, I investigated the versatile metabolic pathways that Pseudomonas use to degrade complex aromatic molecules. Upon graduating in 2009, I realised my passion for microbes remained strong, but I wanted to learn how they interact with plants, despite knowing little about plants at the time. This led me to southern Germany, where I joined Thomas Ott’s lab at the LMU Munich. I studied how unfolded regions of plant-specific remorin proteins mediate protein interactions and began exploring how these proteins facilitate the interaction between legume plants and rhizobia bacteria. In 2015, I started my own lab at the LMU Munich, where I combined my newfound love for plants and my longstanding passion for microbes to investigate the legume-rhizobia root nodule symbiosis. In 2024, I was appointed Associate Professor at the Department of Plant Molecular Biology at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. Our group is funded by the University of Lausanne, the German Research Foundation, and the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Image © C. Bleese