Elucidating the complexity of ecological systems
Bravo, Sharon and Itamar! Your exceptional achievements in studies have been awarded honors and appreciation. Congratulations on your well-earned successes. Keep up the incredible work!
Welcome back, Tiño! We’re thrilled to have Tiño back in the Lab as a post-doc. We wish you all the best of luck. We missed you.
Dr. Shai started May to strengthen and foster collaborative ties by visiting Duke University, where the NIH project gathered.
A unique visitor marked the last weekend of April, Prof. Darren Evans from the UK graced the Department of Life Science as a special guest of Dr. Shai Pilosof. Prof. Darren delivered an exceptional seminar, enriching our academic community. It was an extraordinary opportunity for Shai’s students to engage with Prof. Darren, sharing their research and benefiting from his expertise. The Shai family opened their home, hosting a delightful Friday dinner for Prof. Darren and the lab.
Time flies! A year has passed, and it’s time to say goodbye to Vicente, who has completed his internship in our lab. We hope his time in Israel was fulfilling both personally and professionally. We do not doubt that Vicente will continue to make meaningful contributions to the field. Take care, Vicente, and all the best!
We had an incredible lab retreat over the weekend (30-31.03.2023). The retreat started on Thursday with a trip to Nahal Amud, where we had a delightful meal at a local Arab restaurant. Later that night, we stayed at a hostel by the Sea of Galilee and enjoyed a fun-filled social evening. The next day, we went on a scenic hike to Harbel Cliff, which offered breathtaking views of the surrounding landscape. For a small glimpse into the trip, have a look at the pictures below.
Ying Jie Wang, a postdoctoral researcher, has recently joined our lab in March. Originally from Taiwan, she brings a wealth of knowledge in stress ecology, community ecology, and eco-evolutionary feedbacks. Despite being with us for just a month, she has already become a key player in our international collaborative project on agent-based modeling of highly-diverse microbial communities. This project brings together ecology and evolution, microbiology, and statistical physics. We are excited to have Ying Jie with us and wish her the best of luck in her research. Welcome to the Lab, Ying Jie!
We are pleased to welcome Itamar, a second-year undergraduate student at BGU, who has recently joined us. Itamar is already working hard, learning the necessary skills and methods to start his project next year. Hope that Itamar enjoys his time in the lab and look forward to seeing the results of Itamar’s hard work. Welcome to the Lab!
Our paper, ‘Conceptualizing microbe-plasmid communities as complex adaptive systems’ on ScienceDirect, available online starting from February 21, 2023. The article discusses the importance of understanding how plasmids shape microbial communities and proposes a theoretical approach to overcome the challenges of studying this complex system. Click on the link to read the paper.
Our paper titled “Multilayer networks of plasmid genetic similarity reveal potential pathways of gene transmission” was published on February 9th, 2023, in “The ISME Journall” under the DOI https://doi.org/10.1038/s41396-023-01373-5. The study utilized multilayer networks to analyze the genetic similarity between plasmids in a population of dairy cows and sheds light on the spread of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) genes across animal hosts. For more details, please see our paper here.