AI & Microbiome

We are excited to host our 7th meetup of AI in Genomics!

Note that this event will be hosted at Google Campus for Startups (Tel Aviv).

In this event, Prof. Elhanan Borenstein (TAU) and Dr. Yael Silberberg (BiomX) will demonstrate how AI is used to better understand human microbiome and its relation to health and disease.

Schedule:

17:45 - Gathering + Pizzas :-)

18:15 - Prof. Elhanan Borenstein (TAU)

"Studying the Human Microbiome: From Big Data to Models"

The human microbiome – the diverse ensemble of microorganisms that populate the human body – represents a vastly complex ecosystem that is tightly linked to our health. Multiple molecular assays at the mixed community level (including metagenomics, meta-transcriptomics, and meta-metabolomics) now enable high-throughput profiling of this system and provide extremely large-scale and comprehensive characterization of its ecology and function. In this talk, I will first review some of these omic-based microbiome big data and discuss the unique challenges involved in their analysis. I will then highlight the pressing need for the development of predictive computational models of the microbiome and of model-based computational methods for integrating and analyzing microbiome multi-omic data. I will finally introduce several novel computational frameworks for linking taxonomic, genomic, metagenomic, and metabolomic information about the microbiome, aiming to improve our understanding of the microbiome in health and disease.

Bio: Prof. Borenstein received his PhD in computer science from Tel-Aviv University, and later held a joint postdoctoral position at the Department of Biology in Stanford University and at the Santa Fe Institute – a think tank for complex systems science. In 2010, he joined the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington (with an adjunct position in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering) as an Assistant Professor, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2014. In 2018, he moved back to Israel and now holds a joint position in the Blavatnik School of Computer Science and in the Sackler Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University. He is also an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and has extensive experience in the hi-tech industry. He is the recipient of various awards including the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and the prestigious NIH New Innovator Award. Prof. Borenstein focuses on computational study of the human microbiome, spearheading research in microbiome systems biology, modeling, and design. His lab develops computational methods inspired by metabolic modeling, data science, machine learning, and network theory to model the microbiome and to analyze high-dimensional multi-omic microbiome data. His research ultimately aims to provide a systems-based understanding of the microbiome in health and in disease and to inform microbiome-based therapy.

19:00 - Dr. Yael Silberberg (Head of data science at BiomX Ltd)

"Microbiome Based Biomarker Discovery for Disease State"

In recent years there is growing evidence of the involvement of the microbiome in health and disease. The association of the microbiome with chronic diseases such as IBD and diabetes was demonstrated in multiple studies and the underlying pathways affected by the microbiome composition were illustrated.
I will discuss the need and challenges in microbiome-based biomarker discovery and present our novel computational approach to tackle the problem. Our pipeline uses machine-learning techniques to identify different microbime modules such as strains and genes that can be used as potential targets of the disease.

Bio: Yael Silberberg has several degrees in Eng, Medicine and holds a PhD in Bioinformatics from the University of Tel Aviv. Currently Yael is the head of data science at BiomX, where she leads the computational biology research and development