I became fascinated with microbes when I realized their importance for our life. For my master thesis, I was working with water purification systems. It was amazing to see that microbes alone can clean up even heavily contaminated waste waters so well that the quality of the water after purification with microbes was comparable to natural water bodies. During my doctoral research and later I focused on plants and their microbiomes became a major part of my research. Today I am convinced that plants and their microbiomes show a strong coevolution and terms like “metaorganisms” or “holobionts” (scientist speak for lots of organisms working together as one) nicely describe these interactions. Finally, me and my team also implemented the human microbiome into our research and I started loving “my microbiome”. It is a great privilege to work in a decade, where we are beginning to understand the importance of microbes for our daily life and to contribute to this research. You can find out more about me and my research team here.