Dr. Itai Sharon

Dr. Itai Sharon
Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor)
Principal Investigator
Research Group Leader
Ph.D., 2010, Technion, Israel

Lab Website

Research Interests:

1. Plant-microbiome interactions

2. The diversity of the human-associated microbiome

3. Designing computational methods for metagenomics analysis

We are studying the microbiome of different environments. The lab utilizes molecular biology techniques along with advanced computational methods and data science approaches to generate and analyze metagenomics and other data. Currently, research in the lab is focused on human-associated microbes and plant-microbiome interactions.

CV

Education

Ph.D. Computer Science. Dissertation title: Computational methods for metagenomic analysis, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.

M.Sc. Computer Science. Research focus: similarity detection for low complexity and remotely related proteins, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.

B.Sc. Computer Science, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.

Academic positions

2015 – present: Principal Investigator, MIGAL – Galilee Research Institute. Research focuses on the study of plant- and human-associated microbial communities.
2015 – present: Senior Lecturer, the Computer Science Department, Tel-Hai College. Teaches basic and advanced courses in programming, data science, and bioinformatics.
2010 – 2015: Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Earth and Planetary Science, University of California, Berkeley. Research focus: dynamics and structure of microbial communities across different environments.

For a complete list of publications please check Dr. Sharon's Google scholar page

Scientific Publications

Reconstructing a puzzle: Existence of cyanophages containing both photosystem-I & photosystem- II gene-suites inferred from oceanic metagenomic datasets

Alperovitch A., Sharon I., Rohwer F., Aro E.M., Milo R., Nelson N., Béjà, O.
Environ Microbiol. 2011 Volume 13 Pages 24-32
2011

Comparative metagenomics of microbial traits within oceanic viral communities

Sharon, I., Battchikova, N., Aro, E.-M., Giglione, C., Meinnel, T., Glaser, F., Pinter, R.Y., Breitbart, M., Rohwer, F., Béjà, O
ISME J 2011 Volume 5 Issue 7 Pages 1178-1190
2011

Genomic island variability facilitates Prochlorococcus-virus coexistence

Avrani, S., Wurtzel, O., Sharon, I., Sorek, R., Lindell, D
Nature 2011 Volume 474 Pages 604-608
2011

Comparative community genomics in the Dead Sea, an increasingly extreme environment

Bodaker I., Sharon I., Suzuki M.T., Feingersch R., Shmoish M., Andreishcheva E., Sogin M.L., Rosenber M., Maguire M.E., Belkin S., Oren O., Béjà O.
ISME J 2010 Volume 4 Issue 3 Pages 399- 407
2010

Pathway-based functional analysis of metagenomes

Sharon I., Bercovici S., Pinter R., Shlomi T.
J Comput Biol 2010 Volume 18 Issue 3 Pages 495-505
2010

A statistical framework for the functional analysis of metagenomes

Sharon, I., Pati, A., Markowitz, V.M., Pinter, R.Y.
Computational Molecular Biology Proceedings of 13th Annual International Conference on Research in (RECOMB), LNCS 2009 Volume 5541 Pages 496-511
2009

Microbial community genomics in eastern Mediterranean Sea surface waters

Feingersch, R., Suzuki, M.T., Shmoish, M., Sharon, I., Sabehi, G., Partensky, F., Béjà, O.
ISME J. 2009 Volume 4 Issue 1 Pages 78-87
2009

Photosystem I gene cassettes are present in marine virus genomes

Sharon I., Alperovitch A., Rohwer F., Haynes M., Glaser F., Atamna-Ismaeel N., Pinter R.Y., Partensky F., Koonin E.V., Wolf Y.I., Nelson N., Béjà O.
Nature 2009 Volume 461 Pages 258-262
2009

Prediction of protein-protein Interactions: a study on the co-evolution model.

Sharon, I., Davis, J.V. and Yona, G.
In Methods Mol Biol: Computational Systems Biology ,2009, Ed. ,Springer-Verlag , Pages 61-88
2009

The tryptophan pathway genes of the Sargasso Sea metagenome: new operon structure

Kagan, J., Sharon, I., Béjà, O., Kuhn, J.
Genome Biol 2008 Volume 9 Issue 1 Pages R20
2008

Widespread distribution of proteorhodopsins in freshwater and brackish ecosystems

Atamna-Ismaeel, N., Sabehi, G., Sharon, I., Witzel, K-P., Labrenz, M., Jurgens, K., Barkay, T., Stomp, M., Huisman, J., Béjà, O.
ISME J 2008 Volume 2 Issue 6 Pages 656-662
2008

Reverse dissimilatory sulfite reductase as phylogenetic marker for a subgroup of sulfur-oxidizing prokaryotes

Loy, A., Duller, S., Baranyi, C., Mußmann, M., Ott, J., Sharon, I., Béjà, O., Le Paslier, D., Dahl, C., Wagner, M.
Environ Microbiol. 2008 Volume 11 Issue 2 Pages 289-299
2008

Viral photosynthetic reaction center genes and transcripts in the marine environment

Sharon, I.*, Tzahor, S.*, Williamson, S.*, Shmoish, M., Man-Aharonovich, D., Rusch, D.B., Yooseph, S., Zeidner, G., Golden, S.S., Mackey, S.R., Adir, N., Weingart, U., Horn, D., Venter, J.C., Mandel-Gutfreund, Y., Béjà, O.
ISME J 2007 Volume 1 Issue 6 Pages 492-501
2007

Correcting BLAST e-values for low-complexity segments

Sharon, I., Birkland, A., Chang, K., El-Yaniv, R., Yona, G.
J Comput Biol 2006 Volume 12 Issue 7 Pages 978-1001
2006