Itai Sharon's hompage |
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E-mail: itaish@berkeley.edu Address: 108 Hilgard Hall, University of California, Berkeley Phone (lab): (510) 642 9690 VitaeI am a postdoctoral researcher at Prof. Jill Banfield's lab in UC Berkeley.My CV Scientific BioMicrobial ecology is a field of research in which microbes are studied in the context of their community and environment. The field has gone through significant changes in recent years with the introduction of techniques for collecting and sequencing genomic data directly from the environment, an approach that is commonly known as metagenomics. Accompanied with the introduction of next generation sequencing technologies it is now possible to get a deeper insight into microbial communities than was even imagined just a few years ago. The magnitude of metagenomic projects has gone from a few tens of millions base-pairs just a few years ago to hundreds of billions base-pairs in studies published recently, and the trend is expected to continue in the near future. The increase in sequencing capacity brings a lot of opportunities, but also many challenges that are related to data handling and analysis. In fact, it becomes increasingly difficult to adjust existing computational algorithms and tools to the growing amounts and complexity of metagenomic data.For me, as a person who is fascinated by microbes and proficient in computer science, metagenomics is the perfect place at the current time. My work at Prof. Jill Banfield's lab involves both the development of new methods and strategies for analyzing large metagenomics Illumina datasets, as well as making sense of the data in order to get firm biological insights. I spend most of my time studying the process of microbial colonization of the infant gut, which occurs during the first few months of life. During this time the infant's gut is colonized by various microbes that later develop into mature microbiome that is essential for our health. By studying this process we hope to get insights that may be applicable to a wide range of similar situations, both in the human body and elsewhere. We also hope to provide explanations for what can make the process go wrong which is of potential clinical importance. I am also involved in other projects in the lab such as the study of microbial communities in acid mine drainage and also Uranium contaminated groundwater. I did my Ph.D. at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, under the supervision of Prof. Oded Béjà from the Faculty of Biology and Prof. Ron Pinter from the Faculty of Computer Science. During my Ph.D. I studied microbial communities in marine environments. I devoted a significant portion of my time to the study of interactions between phages (viruses that infect bacteria) and their hosts in these environments, a topic that I find particularly interesting. Selected PublicationsSharon, I., Battchikova, N., Aro, E.-M., Giglione, C., Meinnel, T., Glaser, F., Pinter, R.Y., Breitbart, M., Rohwer, F., and Béjà, O. (2011). Comparative metagenomics of microbial traits within oceanic viral communities. ISME J, 5(7), 1178-1190.Accompanying website: VirMic. Avrani, S., Wurtzel, O., Sharon, I., Sorek, R., Lindell, D. (2011). Genomic island variability facilitates Prochlorococcus-virus coexistence. Nature, 474, 604-608. Sharon, I., Pati, A., Markowitz, V.M. and Pinter, R.Y. (2009). A statistical framework for the functional analysis of metagenomes. Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB), Vol. 5541, 496-511. 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. and Béjà, O. (2009). Photosystem-I gene cassettes are present in marine virus genomes. Nature, 461, 258-262. 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. and Béjà, O. (2007). Viral photosynthetic reaction center genes and transcripts in the marine environment. ISME J, 1(6), 492-501. *Equal contribution |
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Last updated: 03/Dec/2011 |
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