Rotem Sorek got his PhD studying human genetics, but he soon learned his true affinity was for microbes. Sorek started his doctoral research around the time that the human genome was being decoded, and he found the field exciting. But as he was finishing his dissertation, scientists were just beginning to crack the genetic code of numerous microbial genomes. The sheer number of microbes with genomes still to be explored proved more enticing to Sorek than the singular human genome.
“There’s just so much to discover there, it’s like a treasure trove of genomic information,” says Sorek, now a geneticist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.
Sorek completed his undergraduate, master’s, and PhD degrees at Tel Aviv University, and in 2006 moved institutions and countries to do his postdoc with geneticist Edward Rubin at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Rubin was then the director of ...
