Bernard Henrissat is a Novo-Nordisk Foundation Professor in Enzyme Discovery at the Technical University of Denmark since April 2021. He is also Emeritus CNRS Director of Research at the University of Marseille, France, where he headed the Glycogenomics research team and the CAZy database. He has obtained a Ph.D. in Chemistry in 1979 and a D.Sc. in Physical Sciences in 1985, both from the University of Grenoble, France. Over the years he has studied all aspects of carbohydrate-active enzymes (CAZymes), from mechanistic enzymology to structural biology, from bioinformatics to genomics and metagenomics, from basic science to applications. He is probably best known for having proposed the classification of carbohydrate-active enzymes in sequence-based families in the early 90’s, for having launched the CAZy database (www.cazy.org) in 1998, and for its monthly updates since then. Over the last few years Bernard Henrissat has reported and continues reporting numerous novel CAZyme families and CAZyme activities, progressively uncovering the immense CAZyme diversity in the biosphere. His work, which links carbohydrates to genomic and metagenomic science, impacts all fields where complex carbohydrates play a role.

Clara Sánchez-Rodríguez is Assistant Professor of Plant Cell Biology at ETH Zurich since April 2015, and co-chair of the Institute of Molecular Plant Biology (ETHZ) since February 2017. She has a Master in Agronomy from Polytechnic University of Madrid, where she also obtained her PhD on plant resistance to necrotrophic fungi (supervised by A. Molina). During a short visit to Somervilles´ labs, she was fascinated by plant cell walls. Thus, her postdoctoral research focused on the mechanisms of cellulose synthesis in plants (at S. Persson´s group), pioneering the fields of cellulose synthesis regulation by hormones and vesicle trafficking. She is one of the leader discoverers of the TPLATE complex, a clathrin-mediated endocytosis adaptor essential in plants, but not present in animals and yeast. This achievement was honored by the Jeff Schell Award for Plant Scientists. Employing molecular and cell biology methods, her group contributes to understanding the molecular basis of the cell wall role in plant resilience, particularly during the intercellular growth of vascular fungi.