Dr. Ruth Cohen-Khait : Bio-Molecular Bacterial Mastery

Our lab mission is to explore how bacteria are communicating with each other, better understand how bacteria shape the species composition of their community, and examine whether we could apply molecules which are naturally used by bacteria for rational design of bacterial communities.

About the lab

The lab works in two directions which crosstalk: 

  1. The ecological line - explores natural bacterial communities, examines their genomic reservoir, and searches for community composition shaping genes
  2.  The molecular line - which investigates the mechanisms of function of protein based naural antibiotics

The bio-molecular bacterial mastery lab is a wet lab which also applies computational tools to study bacterial communities. The lab develops bio-molecules (proteins/nucleic acids) to shape and design natural bacterial populations. Specifically we apply: molecular biology, in vitro evolution, FACS, microscopy, various biophysical and biochemical methods, environmental sampling and bioinformatics to develop our bio-molecules and examine their impact on natural bacterial populations.