It's a microbial world out there
...and we love it!
Scroll down to read how we combine
bioinformatics and experimental approaches
to study antibiotic resistance, CRISPR-Cas
and other fascinating microbial systems.
The Burstein Lab
Our Research
Metagenomics, Machine learning, Molecular microbiology, and Fun!
We strive to better understand key interaction mechanisms within microbial communities and to promote their application in biotechnology and medicine. By combining state-of-the-art machine learning, molecular biology, and metagenomic techniques, we decipher functions in the nexus of microbial interactions, such as CRISPR-Cas, anti-CRISPRs, antibiotic resistance genes, and bacterial secretion systems.
If you're interested to learn about “reading” microbial genomes using language models, the experiments we conducted in the international space station, or how plasmids protect themselves against systems such as CRISPR-Cas, we invite you to read about our research projects here.
Publications Highlights
A Review of NLP Approaches in Genomics, Transcriptomics, and Proteomics
arXiv 2025
DRAMMA: an ML approach for antimicrobial resistance gene detection in metagenomic data
Microbiome 2025
Diverse anti-defence systems
are encoded in the leading
region of plasmids
Nature 2024
GeNLP: a web tool for
NLP-based exploration of microbial gene
function
Bioinformatics 2024
CRISPR-Based Genetic
Diagnostics in Microgravity
Biosensors and Bioelectronics 2023
Deciphering microbial gene
function using natural
language processing
Nature Communications 2022
Programmed DNA destruction by miniature CRISPR-Cas14 enzymes
Science 2018
New CRISPR–Cas systems from uncultivated microorganisms
Nature 2017
Major bacterial lineages are essentially devoid of CRISPR-Cas viral defence systems
Nature Communications 2016
Genomic analysis of 38 Legionella species identifies diverse effector repertoires
Nature Genetics 2016
Computational modeling and
experimental validation of the
type-IVB secretion signal
PNAS 2013
Genome-Scale Identification of Legionella pneumophila Effectors Using ML
PLoS Pathogens 2009
Our Team
David (Dudu) Burstein
Principal Investigator
Karin Mittelman
Research Associate
Bruria Samuel
Ph.D. Student
Ella Rannon
Ph.D. Student
Shirley Croitoru
Ph.D. Student
Guy Shur
Ph.D. Student
Ori Ben-Shir
Ph.D. Student
Asaf Zorea
Ph.D. Student
Nadav Shalev
M.Sc. Student
Chen Agassy
M.Sc. Student
Tomer Parket
Data Analyst
Ofir Arias
Software Specialist
Shahar Mayo
Undergraduate Student
Rotem Vasana
Undergraduate Student
Stay in Touch
Office: +972-3-640-8715
Lab: +972-3-640-7525
Fax: +972-3-642-2046
davidbur@tauex.tau.ac.il