Research Lab Areas
Microbial species are ubiquitous, existing not in isolation but within communities where they engage in dynamic interactions with other species, hosts, and the environment. These communities play a crucial role in shaping not only our health but also the well-being of animals, plants, the food we consume, and the broader environmental ecosystem.
At the laboratory, they embrace a comprehensive approach that spans classic microbiology, high-throughput genomics, single-cell methodologies, and computational analysis. The lab’s mission is to untangle the intricate dynamics of interspecies interactions, unraveling the profound impact they have on the assembly, function, and evolution of microbial species—especially when faced with stress and environmental challenges.
Scholar Profile
Sivan Pearl Mizrahi is an experimental biologist who uses computational tools to make sense of the living world. For her PhD in the Microbiology and Molecular Genetics Department of the Medical School at The Hebrew University, which she researched jointly with an advisor from the physics department, she examined processes that contribute to variation between different cells under identical conditions. She focused on subpopulations exposed to stress, like persistent cells (both bacterial and mammalian) that manage to survive antibiotic treatments, chemotherapy, and bacteriophage attacks. During her doctorate, Dr. Pearl-Mizrahi was awarded a prestigious Clore scholarship for outstanding young Israeli scientists.
The Pearl Mizrahi lab at the Hebrew University’s Institute of Biochemistry, Food Science and Nutrition of the Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment aims to discover how the interactions between different microbial species shape the ecology and evolution of different systems facing stress and environmental challenges. Her focus is on microbial community dynamics, using fermentation and food spoilage processes as model systems.
For her postdoctoral research at Hebrew University’s Computational Molecular Biology department, Dr. Pearl Mizrahi studied how small RNA molecules interact with messenger RNA molecules in Enteropathogenic E. coli, identifying key RNA-RNA interactions in the pathogen’s virulence mechanisms.
She completed a second postdoc at MIT’s Physics of Living Systems department, as part of the Fulbright scholarship program, focusing on how interactions between different bacteria shape the structure and function of the microbial community, and how such communities evolve under antibiotic stress. Her work is important in understanding bacterial response to antibiotics. While most studies on evasion of antibiotic action by bacteria have researched a single strain, it is well known that bacteria live in communities, making it crucial to examine interactions in a community context. Her research was supported by fellowships from the European Molecular Biology Organization and the Human Frontier Science Program.
Dr. Pearl Mizrahi hopes her discoveries eventually lead to the development of tools to control and steer microbial community dynamics, which could have an impact on agriculture, industry, and medicine.