Bernard Henrissat is a CNRS Director of Research and working at the University of Marseille, France, where he heads the Glycogenomics research group 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 best known for having proposed the classification of carbohydrate-active enzymes in sequence-based families in the early 90’s and 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 numerous novel CAZyme families and CAZyme activities, progressively uncovering the immense CAZyme diversity in the biosphere.