Denis Faure is CNRS research director at the Institute of Integrative Biology of the Cell, Gif-sur-Yvette, France, and has been co-chair of the French network on Environmental Genomics since 2011. For the past 20 years, he has worked on a combination of ecology and genomics approaches to plant-host microbe and microbe-microbe interactions. His research is currently focused on bacterial communication in plant-bacteria interactions, and bacterial genome structure and dynamics in plant pathogens.