Regine Kahmann

German microbiologist Regine Kahmann was Director of Organismic Interactions at the Max Planck Research Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology from 2000 to 2019. She now has emeritus status.

Her work was dedicated to the question how fungi colonize plants and cause disease. Her group has developed the biotrophic fungus Ustilago maydis as a model to obtain molecular insights into how this fungus suppresses host immune responses and modulates plant processes to benefit the pathogen. Since the 2006 publication of the U. maydis genome sequence and detecting clustered genes encoding novel secreted protein effectors, her group has focused on the challenging functional analysis of such novel effectors and how a subset of them are taken up by cells of the host plant.

Her academic work was undertaken at the University of Gottingen and the Free University of Berlin before she began postdoctoral work at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1980.