Microorganisms are main players in the balance of health and disease. Microbial activities strongly influence agricultural production, the health of the natural environment, and the interplay between them.
Our research topics include how pathogenic microorganisms attack plants; how plants defend themselves, how microorganisms help them help themselves against pathogens and how they survive on plant surfaces.
Department members who conduct research on these themes are:
Prof. Saul Burdman, Dr. Shay Covo, Prof. Yitzhak Hadar, Dr. Yael Helman, Dr. Nadav Kashtan, Dr. Maggie Levy, and Prof. Oded Yarden.
We also study how microbial communities assemble and work to provide beneficial or detrimental outputs, how specific microbial players function to affect processes affecting plant health or wastewater purification and organic waste degradation.
These topics are studied by
Prof. Saul Burdman, Dr. Yael Helman, Dr. Jonathan Friedman, Prof. Yitzhak Hadar, Dr Asaf Levy, and Prof. Edouard Jurkevitch.
Our research also addresses how these processes are affected by microbe-microbe interactions like cell-cell communication to create coordinated responses, how bacteria and fungi fight each other with molecular weapons or prey on each other.
Our faculty members researching those topics are:
Dr. Yael Helman, Prof. Edouard Jurkevitch, Dr. Asaf Levy, and Dr. Maggie Levy.
Finally, to understand how these phenomena emerge, we apply high throughput sequencing and –omics approaches, bioinformatics, high-end microscopy and mathematical modeling, and explore how fungi and bacteria grow, their genetics, physiology and the molecular mechanisms controlling them.
All department members actively pursue such goals:
Prof. Saul Burdman, Dr. Shay Covo, Dr. Jonathan Friedman, Prof. Yitzhak Hadar, Dr. Yael Helman, Prof. Edouard Jurkevitch, Dr. Nadav Kashtan, Dr Asaf Levy, Dr. Maggie Levy, and Prof. Oded Yarden.
We participate in the hub for Next Generation Agriculture, as well as in the Agriculture, Environment and Natural Resources Research Center.
