Team

Ilja comes from Germany. He works on bioionformatics pipelines.

Exposure to bacterial pathogens and symbionts plays a major role in shaping plant genomes through the course of evolution. My research focuses on identifying genomic signatures of plant-bacterial interactions in order to discover and understand plant adaptations to biotic stress. As a bioinformatician, I address these questions by developing computational methods, which take advantage of rich sequence data, such as population-level genomics. Specifically, I employ a comparative-genomics approach, which frames the analysis of sequence information in the context of the underlying evolutionary process.

After the sampling action of Hyaloperonospora arabidopsidis in the wild as part of the project Pathodopsis, this oomycete caught my interest not only as a chance to do field work also on the molecular level. I am highly interested in the coevolutionary pattern between the obligate biotroph and its host. One signature of tracking this process is to concentrate on virulence factors. I am focusing on the role of pathogenic effector variants on a European-wide scale.