The team

    


Dr. Yariv Brotman | Senior lecturer and group leader (click for CV)


Dr. Simy Weil | Lab manager
Simy runs the lab’s daily operations. In addition, she is directly involved in many of the group’s projects and is responsible for running the metabolomic analysis platform.


Dr. Sandra Marcela Correra Cordoba | Postdoctoral fellow
Sandra’s research revolves around  developing ways to utilize plants for the production of unusually structured lipids that are much needed for industrial purposes. Two plants that show great promise in this regard are castor and jojoba. Sandra studies the metabolic networks of these plants, with focus on lipids, and is an expert in metabolic fluxes.


Anastasiya Kuhalskaya | PhD student
Anastasiya performs genetic mapping of lipids and secondary metabolites in tomato fruits for the purpose of finding genes that affect flavor and palatability. Among others, she uses tomato wild species in order to see which genes were lost or gained during thousands of years of domestication and cultivation. This will potentially be useful in breeding programs that attempt to address these traits.


Leah Rosental | PhD student
Leah will study metabolic natural variation in a large panel of tomato accessions under different stress conditions. She measures a variety of horticultural and agronomical traits, which she will integrate with the metabolomic data. This will yield new gene targets for breeding efforts and will increase our basic knowledge of the metabolic reactions that occur in this crucial crop.


Weronika Jasińska | PhD student
Metabolons—supramolecular complexes of enzymes catalyzing sequential metabolic reactions—orchestrate multiple metabolic processes insidee the cell. our current understanding of how metabolons contribute to metabolic regulation remains scarce, primarily because metabolic pathways and protein-protein interaction networks are traditionally studied independently. Weronika, in a project jointly supervised by Dr. Shimon Bershtein, employs an alternative approach to understand how the integration between metabolic pathways and protein-protein interaction networks affects fluxes in response to metabolic demands of the cell. Weronika’s model organism is the gram-positive bacterium Bacillus subtilis.

Dvir Meiri | MSc student

Tali Neiger | MSc student

Yelyzaveta Shapiro | MSc student

Ezra Shternlichet | BSc student

Former members


Taly Lapidot-Cohen | MSc student
Taly studied different strains of the common bean originating from South America, Central America and Europe, with the purpose of defining the architecture of lipid metabolism in this important crop. She performed metabolomic analysis of leaf and seed tissue, then integrated the results with phenotypic and genomic data. In another project, Taly studied metabolic natural variation in a large panel of tomato accessions under different stress conditions.


Urszula Luzarowska | PhD student
Urszula studied the natural variation of lipid composition in Arabidopsis, a classic research plant. How do plants adjust the lipid composition of their cell membranes in response to heat stress? How have different Arabidopsis strains, originating from different parts of the world, developed varying capacities to deal with such stress? These are two prominent questions in Urszula’s research.


Anne-Kathrin Russ | MSc student
Anne-Kathrin supported Urszula’s project regarding lipid composition of Arabidopsis cell membranes. Whereas Urszula used leaf tissue in her research, Anne-Kathrin used seeds. This allowed us to focus on tissue-specific lipids and processes, and has potential practical importance, since many crops are grown for the oil that they accumulate in their seeds.