We are interested in generating proteins with new functions including enzymes, transcription factors and receptors using advanced protein engineering methodologies. In the past few years, a breakthrough in the field of protein engineering was achieved by the development of a new approach termed directed protein evolution. Laboratory directed evolution methodologies are based on natural Darwinian evolution in which the fittest protein variants are selected from a population containing genetic diversity. We use this approach for the generation of engineered proteins with a variety of new functions, including new enzymes with novel reaction and substrate specificities and proteins with new binding activities. This approach is utilized in order to advance our knowledge of fundamental biological processes and for practical biotechnological and therapeutic applications.

Dovrat, D., Dahan, D., Sherman, S., Tsirkas, I., Elia, N., Aharoni, A. (2018) A live-cell imaging approach for measuring DNA replication rates. Cell Rep. Jul 3;24(1):252-258.

Dahan, D., Tsirkas, I., Dovrat, D., Sparks, M.A., Singh, S.P., Galletto, R., Aharoni, A. (2018) Pif1 is essential for efficient replisome progression through G-quadruplex DNA secondary structures. Nucleic Acids Research, Nov 5. doi: 10.1093/nar/gky1065.

Soreanu, I., Hendler, A., Dahan, D., Dovrat, D., Aharoni, A. (2018) Marker-free genetic manipulations in yeast using CRISPR/CAS9 system. Curr Genet. Apr 6. doi: 10.1007/s00294-018-0831-y.

Gertman, O., Omer, D., Hendler, A., Stein, D., Onn, L., Khukhin, Y., Portillo, M., Zarivach, R., Cohen, H.Y., Toiber, D., Aharoni, A. (2018) Directed evolution of SIRT6 for improved deacylation and glucose homeostasis maintenance. Sci Rep. Feb 23;8(1):3538

Hendler, A., Medina, E.M., Kishkevich, A., Abu-Qarn, M., Klier, S., Buchler, N.E., de Bruin, R.A.M , Aharoni, A. (2017) Gene duplication and co-evolution of G1/S transcription factors specificity in fungi are essential for optimizing cell fitness. PLoS Genetics May 15;13(5):e1006778

Ph.D. The Weizmann Institute of Science, 2001