Mizrahi Lab

Plasmids are huge drivers of evolution in every ecosystem, allowing microbes to acquire new genes. But how much do they shape our own human microbiome? 🧬

A fantastic new review from the @lgbacteria.bsky.social
summarizes the latest key findings.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Whooo! Congratulations 🥳

Function-Based Selection of Synthetic Communities Enables Mechanistic Microbiome Studies Understanding the complex interactions between microbes and their environment requires robust model systems such as synthetic communities (SynComs). We developed a functionally directed approach to ge...

How to design new synthetic microbial communities? It's a huge question we're still deeply exploring 🦠
Check out this new preprint by @tcahitch.bsky.social & @tclavel.bsky.social! They developed an function-directed approach using metagenomic to build better SynComs.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

3-day 'Science meets Art' retreat ended. Thanks to
Daniel Chamovitz, Pres. of Ben Gurion University of the Negev, for support & inspiring talk. His insights led to unique microbe-to-art collab.

Stay tuned for exhibition date & time!🧑‍🎨

#ArtScience #BGU #Microbiology #Exhibition

Good luck! 🦠

We opened the final day of our #retreat with an inspiring talk by Dr. Yakov Merhishti. 📔
We concluded our mission of "seeing the invisible" by exploring microbial #fermentation from a new perspective: with a wine tasting! We toasted the tiny #microbes that make it possible 🦠🍷

Continuing work on our exhibition #microbes 🎨
Honored by a talk from Prof. Itzik Hen, director of The Institute for Advanced Studies Jerusalem and a researcher, followed by a food tour at Mahane Yehuda Market, and a recital by Ido Grinshpan and Shelly Jonathan.🎻
Stay tuned for #exhibition details! 🦠

Day 1 of our 'Science meets Art' retreat was fantastic! We had an inspiring talk from prof. Noam Mizrahi and a great visit to the The Israel Museum. Afterward, we continued our project, creating new art pieces inspired by the invisible world of microbes. 🦠

#Microbiology #ArtScience #Collaboration

Iron-respiring microbes could have a role in sulfur cycling A species of bacteria grows when both ferrihydrite and sulfide are present, but not when either is absent.

Iron-respiring microbes could have a role in sulfur cycling www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Science meets art! 🔬🎨 Our lab is at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies (IIAS) for a 3-day retreat with amazing artists Tamara Efrat & Shaul Cohen, diving into the unseen beauty of microbial life.

Get ready for our upcoming exhibition at Be'er Sheva. Stay tuned!

#Microbiology #ArtScience

Design | Tamara Anna Efrat Design, Art, Technology | Tel Aviv-Yafo Tamara Anna Efrat is an Interdisciplinary Artist and Designer. My research and creative work focus on the relationship between traditional craft and digital technology.

Tamara Anna Efrat - www.tamaraefrat.com

Shaul Cohen - www.shaulcohen.com

Project - Plasmidlab PLAS-FIGHTER Exploiting plasmid-bacteria interactions to fight

Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) could cause 10 million deaths by 2050. At PLAS-FIGHTER, we are working to change this!
🔎 We study how plasmids spread resistance to open up new avenues for future containment and diagnostic strategies.
Find out more 👇
plasmidlab.es/project/

#AntibioticResistance

misosoup: A metabolic modeling tool for identifying minimal microbial communities reveals pervasive cross-feeding–driven niche expansion Microbial survival and function often depend on metabolic interactions within communities. Therefore, a central question to disentangle microbial organization is what minimal groups of species are abl...

a key question in microbial ecology: which community members are necessary and sufficient for survival where individual species cannot? 🤔
Misosoup, a new Python package, try addresses this problem.

Nicolas Ochsner, Sebastian Bonhoeffer & Alberto Pascual-García

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Why are there so few pathogens? Ecology and evolution in pathogen emergence Why are there so few pathogens, and what determines their emergence? This Perspective argues that ecological and evolutionary forces (host availability, geographic exposure and microbial innovation) w...

Given the tremendous diversity of microorganisms in the world, why do only a small fraction cause disease?

My essay in #PLOSBiology argues that the answer is lack of opportunity and that humans encounter only one new bacterial pathogen for every 1.4b years lived.

journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

The session of Microbial adaptations to changing environments chaired and organized by @sanmillan.bsky.social
@javierdelafuente.bsky.social @mtoll8.bsky.social just started by extremely inspaireing talk by @saramitri.bsky.social so much fun at the @eseb2025.bsky.social

Applying ecological principles to microbiome engineering - Nature Microbiology This Perspective discusses the application of ecological principles of macro-ecosystems to microbiome engineering. The authors propose research priorities necessary to facilitate the application of th...

Years of research on the fundamental processes of microbial ecology have led to a new question: How can we engineer these communities? 🛠️

A review by Joy Bergelson and Lucas Henry summarizes these core principles and their application.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Nice work, Ben! Really important effort.

Yesterday, we had the honor of attending the closing concert of a Chamber music course that took place at our university !🎹
One of our PhD students, Jonathan Shelly , also participated in this course with his amazing violin—take a look!🎻

Title page of the review article 'The Physics of Sensing and Decision-Making by Animal Groups' by Danielle L. Chase and Orit Peleg in Annual Review of Biophysics. Includes illustrations of collective behavior in honeybees: a diagram showing uncommitted scout bees transitioning through decision-making to choose between two nest sites; a honeybee on a honeycomb cell; a cluster of bees hanging from a branch; and a schematic of bees forming a layered cluster.

More on collective behavior: Our new Annual Review of Biophysics piece - with the stellar Danielle Chase - explores how animals sense, share information, and make group decisions. In honeybees and beyond 🐝

www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Structural insights into light harvesting by antenna-containing rhodopsins in marine Asgard archaea - Nature Microbiology Uncultured open-ocean Asgard archaea can harvest light energy using rhodopsins and diverse hydroxylated carotenoid antennas.

Archaea never stop to surprise us! 🌞 @bejalab.bsky.social @galitzlil.bsky.social discovered that marine archaea use carotenoid "antennas" to capture blue light, transferring the energy to their rhodopsin pumps. A huge leap in microbial photobiology!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Discovery of NOT-GPCRs: An Archaeal Membrane Protein Family Whose AlphaFold Predictions Structurally Resemble G Protein-coupled Receptors jxiv.jst.go.jp/index.php/jx...

Final presentations in our Microbial Ecology: Theories & Contemporary Questions course 🎓🦠
Tomer chose to manifest ecological dynamics using visual props.
I love it when people, especially students, color outside the lines.

#ISM2025 Was very fruitful! It was fun to connect with friends and exchange amazing scientific ideas.
Also, we had the chance to present our work!
Our postdoc, Omer Lavy, shared his research on "biblical poop."
Our PhD student, Sarah Winkler, presented her poster on "Decoding Microbial Communities"

Intraspecies warfare restricts strain coexistence in human skin microbiomes - Nature Microbiology About 15,000 pairwise interactions within S. epidermidis from 18 people in 6 families reveal the antagonism and molecular trade-offs that shape the skin microbiota.

Engrafting a new microbe into an ecosystem remains a challenge. ⛰️ New article profiles ~15K interactions between S. epidermidis strains, showing a direct antagonism between strains - as a major barrier to coexistence.
Nice work!
@contaminatedsci.bsky.social @mancusosci.bsky.social

shorturl.at/XTvfC

What a strike! 🎳 Our lab's bowling event was a blast! So much fun hitting the lanes and making memories with the team.

#LabLife #Bowling #TeamFun #ScienceSquad

Great job, Asaf and team! Really interesting findings.

We have a new 3-year postdoc position in our group at the @hifmb.de to study plasmids and plasmids systems of the marine environment to survey their utility in microbial responses to environmental change.

Please see the official job ad here, and spread the word:

jobs.awi.de/Vacancies/20...

Our Post-doc Omar Tovar rocked it at #INRAE2025! 🎉
He presented his fascinating work on "Exploring the functional patterns of the core rumen microbiome." Huge thanks to @inrae-france.bsky.social ‬for hosting!

Macroecological patterns in experimental microbial communities Author summary Determining whether an empirical pattern can be manipulated is a crucial step towards building a predictive theory. Our study aimed to determine the extent that experimental manipulatio...

Macroecological patterns in experimental microbial communities, led by Will Shoemaker & Jacopo Grilli
journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Love this!