Rate My Professor Sebastian Schornack

Professor Sebastian Schornack serves as Research Professor and Research Group Leader at the Sainsbury Laboratory, University of Cambridge, holding a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. He completed his undergraduate, Master's, and PhD degrees at Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg under Thomas Lahaye, focusing his doctoral thesis on characterizing the tomato TIR-NB-LRR protein Bs4, which confers resistance to Xanthomonas campestris pv vesicatoria. After a brief postdoctoral stint with Lahaye, Schornack conducted postdoctoral research in Sophien Kamoun's group at the Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich. In 2012, he established his independent research program at the Sainsbury Laboratory Cambridge, where he was promoted to Principal Gatsby Fellow in 2019. He is a full affiliate of the Department of Plant Sciences and contributes to teaching within the University of Cambridge.

Schornack's research centers on microbe-induced host cell reprogramming mediated by effector proteins translocated into plant cells, encompassing plant pathogen effectors, disease resistance proteins, TAL effectors, and oomycete effectors such as Crinklers. His group explores interactions between plants and oomycetes like Phytophthora infestans and Phytophthora palmivora, as well as symbiotic mycorrhizal fungi, elucidating haustoria formation, effector trafficking, and manipulation of host gene expression. Notable contributions include co-discovering the DNA-binding code of TAL effectors, facilitating development of customized TAL activators and nucleases; identifying an ancient class of translocated oomycete effectors targeting the host nucleus (Schornack et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2010); demonstrating that Phytophthora infestans effector AVRblb2 prevents focal secretion of a plant immune protease (Bozkurt et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2011); and revealing a common signaling process promoting mycorrhizal and oomycete colonization of plants (Wang et al., Current Biology, 2012). Other key publications feature the genome sequence and analysis of Phytophthora infestans (Haas et al., Nature, 2009), Phytophthora palmivora establishing tissue-specific infection structures in early land plants (Carella et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2018), and plant evolution driven by interactions with symbiotic and pathogenic microbes (Delaux and Schornack, Science, 2021). His work has profoundly shaped understanding of effector biology in plant-microbe interactions.