Positions available for 2 Graduate Students

We are currently seeking two graduate students to join our lab. Both students should have a strong interests in evolutionary biology:

1. For our project on bacterial adaptation to changes in resource availability (see below), we are seeking an MSc. or PhD student with a strong computational background, as this project involves the development and application of sophisticated computational tools for the analyses of large quantities of genomic and barcode data.
2. For a project related to antibiotic resistance within clinical populations of E. coli that cause urinary tract infections (UTIs), we are searching for an MSc student. This is largely an experimental project, but would be a good fit for someone looking to learn how to carry out basic computational genomic analyses.

About the Lab

Our lab is located in the Faculty of Medicine of the Technion, in Haifa, Israel

We study how bacteria adapt to changing conditions. Bacteria have a remarkable ability to rapidly adapt genetically to the current conditions of their environments. But adaptation to current conditions often comes at a cost to their fitness under other conditions they may have faced in their past and might face again in the future. The push and pull between rapid adaptation to current conditions on the one hand and a need to persist through shifts in conditions on the other will determine long-term bacterial environmental success.

We study how bacteria maintain the ability to persist through changes in conditions, while rapidly adapting to strong selective pressures, focusing on two major systems:

1. Bacterial adaptation to changes in resource availability – Bacteria are capable of surviving for years and even decades following the exhaustion of their growth resources. While a minority of species do this through sporulation, most bacterial species cannot sporulate. Instead, many of them enter a state of growth known as Long-term stationary phase (LTSP). In LTSP a minority of cells can replicate by recycling the remains of other cells that have perished. During this replication, cells accumulate mutations that increase their ability to grow under LTSP. These same mutations reduce the ability to grow once resources are again available. We use evolutionary experiments, sophisticated genomic approaches and evolutionary theory to study how bacteria adapt during LTSP and how this affects their ability to recover once conditions shift and they again have ample growth resources.
2. The evolution of antibiotic resistance and its costs – Antibiotics have revolutionized our ability to medically treat bacterial infections, resulting in a sharp reduction in mortality. However, bacteria are able to very rapidly develop resistance to antibiotics by acquiring genetic adaptations. These resistance adaptations often come at a cost to the bacteria carrying them, which manifest most strongly once they are no longer exposed to antibiotics. These costs and the manner in which bacteria deal with them have the potential to greatly influence our ability to successfully treat bacteria with antibiotics over time. We study resistance, its costs and the consequences of these costs in both lab populations of bacteria and clinical bacterial isolates. By studying the dynamics of adaptation to antibiotics, we can forward our general understanding of the workings of adaptive evolution while at the same time gaining knowledge needed to develop the best strategies for combating the accumulation and spread of antibiotic resistance.

• In addition to our current major focus on bacterial adaptation to changing conditions, our lab also has a strong interest in the longer-term selective and mutational dynamics that shape bacterial genome composition.