A serendipitous meeting of FABI Director Prof. Bernard Slippers and graduate student Anne Oostlander at a forestry conference in 2022 led to the start of a new research collaboration effort between FABI and the Centre for Biology at Technische Universität Braunschweig (TUBS), headed by Prof. André Fleißner. Bernard recently returned from a two month sabbatical visit to the Fungal Genetics lab of Prof. Fleißner in the Department of Genetics at TUBS that had followed an earlier visit to this lab in April 2023. An interview conducted with Bernard about his sabbatical visit was published in the University’s Research magazine and can be read by clicking here. His visit also led to a new research collaboration with the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research and the Julius Kühn-Institute, both also located in Braunschweig. The visit was supported through the Mycobiomics project (MSCA-RISE-2020 Project Nr: 101008129) between FABI and Prof. Marc Stadler of HZI, as well as the University of Pretoria's Department of Research and Innovation.