Assist.-Prof. Dr. Shaul Pollak Pasternak

Bacterial activity has shaped our world for billions of years, and is still critical for the function of virtually all ecosystems on earth. Shaul Pollak is interested in how bacterial interactions mediate functions like protecting plants from pathogens or carbon cycling in soils and oceans. Shaul loves questions that span levels of organization, like how an interaction between specific genes on a chromosome translate to planetary-scale changes in carbon fluxes. To answer these questions, Shaulʼs group integrates genomics, high-throughput experiments and genetics with ecological/ evolutionary theory and machine learning. Current projects include using “genomic dark matter” to predict carbon fluxes in soils, as well as investigating the effects of environmental change on plant-bacteria genetic interactions. Another focus is the evolutionary genomics of the most abundant photosynthetic organism on earth: the marine cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus marinus.