Prof. Bernard Slippers is spending part of his 2026 sabbatical at the Technische Universität Braunschweig (TU Braunschweig) in Germany, supported by his Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Award and the German Global Minds Initiative. He is hosted by Prof. André Fleißner at the Institute of Genetics. A first month-long visit, with side trips to colleagues in Hamburg, Kiel and Göttingen, ended in June 2026, and he returned for a second stay in September. The visit builds on a three-year partnership between Prof. Fleißner's group and FABI, which has grown into joint projects, student and staff exchanges and shared publications, and was recently featured in a TUBS newsletter. A central aim throughout the sabbatical has been to master the new generation of AI research tools, and to share what he learned with colleagues at FABI and beyond. Unlike chat-based tools, these assistants work inside a project. They open and edit files, run analysis pipelines, keep notes and pick up the work weeks later. During the sabbatical Bernard built a set of such assistants for fields at the heart of FABI's work: microbiome metabarcoding, fungal genome assembly and annotation, phylogenetics, population genetics and pest risk analysis. All share one reusable design, are version-controlled on GitHub and run across workstations and high-performance computing. Sharing the learning was part of the plan from the start. Over the past months Bernard has done this through AI training for the African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF), Stellenbosch University and FABI and TUBS colleagues. He has also contributed ideas from this learning at meetings of the Bezos Earth Fund and the Molecular Biology of Fungi Symposium. You can see news items on these activities here.