PEOPLE: CURRENT LAB MEMBERS

Shimon Bershtein, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology
Harvard University
12 Oxford St.
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: (617) 496-4368
Fax: (617) 384-9228
Cellular phone: 617-599-5403
bersht@fas.harvard.edu

Research Summary

I'm interested in various fundamental aspects of protein evolution, especially from the biophysical perspective. Specifically, distribution of fitness effects of mutations, neutral protein evolution, evolution of new protein functions and folds, evolvability, and thermodynamic and kinetic properties of the ancient proteins.

Education

12/2002 - 04/2007 Weizmann Institute of Science (Rehovot, Israel). Ph.D, Biochemistry. Supervisor: Prof. D.Tawfik. Thesis title: "Understanding the underlining mechanisms of random genetic drift by experimental evolution".
09/1997 - 01/2000 Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (Beer-Sheva, Israel). M.Med.Sc, Virology.
09/1994 - 08/1997 Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (Beer-Sheva, Israel). B.Sc, Life Sciences.

Research positions

8/2008 - present day Harvard University (Cambridge, USA). Postdoctoral fellow (Prof. E. Shakhnovich's lab). Integrated theoretical and experimental studies of protein biophysics and protein evolution.
05/2007 - 07/2008 Weizmann Institute of Science (Rehovot, Israel). Postdoctoral fellow (Prof. D.Tawfik's lab). Population and evolutionary genetics.

Publications

1. Bershtein, S. & Tawfik, D.S. (2008) Ohno's model revisited: Measuring the frequency of potentially adaptive mutations under various mutational drifts. Mol. Biol. Evol. 25: 2311-2318.
2. Bershtein, S., Goldin, K. & Tawfik, D.S. (2008) Intense neutral drifts yield robust and evolvable consensus proteins. J. Mol. Biol. 379: 1029-1044.
3. Bershtein, S., Segal, M., Bekerman, R., Tokuriki N. & Tawfik, D.S. (2006) Robustness-epistasis link shapes the fitness landscape of a randomly drifting protein. Nature. 444: 929-932.
4. Bershtein, S. & Tawfik, D.S. (2008) Advances in laboratory evolution of enzymes. Curr. Opin. Chem. Biol. 12: 151-158.