Dr Aileen Berasategui

Biography

I am a Group Leader at The Sainsbury Laboratory (TSL) in Norwich. I obtained my PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, followed by postdoctoral research at Emory University (USA) and the University of Tübingen, Germany. Before joining TSL, I was an Assistant Professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. My research is supported by a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant.

Herbivorous insects transmit many plant pathogens, but how these microbes affect the physiology and fitness of their insect hosts remains poorly understood. My group investigates fungi with a dual lifestyle: plant pathogens that also act as beneficial insect symbionts. In return for dispersal to new host plants, these fungi can provide their insect partners with nutritional or defensive benefits. For example, Fusarium oxysporum protects the pupae of a tortoise leaf beetle from predators.

We aim to understand how these interactions shift along the mutualism–parasitism continuum, and which genomic and metabolic traits enable fungi to function as both pathogens and mutualists. We combine comparative genomics, metabolomics and functional experiments in the laboratory and field, with a particular focus on the secondary metabolites that mediate interactions between fungi, insects, plants and competing microbes.