Nordic countries share resources and expertise through the NOVA PhD programme. The 36^th Nordic PhD course in plant pathology is taking place this year on the topic “Biotrophic and Hemibiotrophic plant pathogens and their host plant interactions”. PhD participants are from Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland. Professor Dave Berger of the MPPI research group in FABI is participating as a Faculty member this year, hosted by Professor David Collinge at the University of Copenhagen. The residential course will be held in April in Denmark, however the course is already running with a weekly series of journal clubs since February. The journal clubs hosted by Dave covered two exciting developments in pathogen effector biology. These are i) the discovery of fungal effectors that are anti-microbial; and ii) the breakthrough of predicting protein structures from amino acid sequences using the artificial intelligence tool Alphafold. MPPI members did a “test run” journal club of each article, and it was interesting to see that the same discussion points came up with both the FABI and NOVA students.