given by Florence Vande Capelle and Céline Ervinckx. Register here 

Here’s a riddle: When 24 Indonesian islands mysteriously disappear, one of the world’s deadliest crime syndicates rises to power, and 8 cities the size of New York are stamped out of the ground every year for the next three decades — what connects them all? Surprisingly, sand. In my first seminar at ELIC, I will talk about my journey from Road Ecology to Sand sustainability.

Rhizomania is a major disease of sugar beet caused by Beet necrotic yellow vein virus (BNYVV), a benyvirus transmitted by the root-infecting plasmodiophorid protist Polymyxa betae. The obligate parasitic nature of plasmodiophorid organisms has long hampered efforts to obtain axenic cultures and complicated the sequencing of their entire genome. In this thesis, genomes of two P.