Welcome to the Berman Lab at Tel Aviv University

How do organisms respond to their environments? This question drives our work.  Our studies focus on Candida albicans and Candida glabrata, two major fungal pathogens that cause superficial as well as invasive infections, which cause more than 400,000 deaths per year. We work to understand drug response mechanisms caused by genetic mutations, genomic copy number changes  as  well as other processes, some of which affect genetically identical cells differently.

We take an interdisciplinary approach using genetics, genomics and cell biology, combined with chemistry, bioinformatics, and computational biology. We are working to elucidate processes such as morphogenesis, chromosome stability, chromatin-mediated silencing, gene essentiality, as well as drug resistance.  Our most recent studies address the role of drug tolerance, the ability of some cells to grow  slowly in the presence of a drug that inhibits other cells in the same population. We are interested in how drug responses differ between cells in a single population, and how adaptive responses differ due to natural genetic variation between yeast isolates.