The Burstein Lab

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.