Eyal Akiva

About me

      I am currently performing my post-doctoral research in prof. Patricia Babbitt's lab. I received my PhD degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (prof. Hanah Margalit's lab).

      My current research invloves enzyme engineering, uncovering new metabolic pathways and tracing the evolution of enzymes.

      I am developing methods for elucidating new metabolic pathways by combining genomic context, metagenomic information and mechanistic details of enzymes, as well as methods for guiding enzyme engineering using the natural seqeunce variability of enzyme superfamilies. In addition, I am developing approaches for target selection, i.e. guiding the selection of specific mutations that alter enzyme function, and also the selection of enzymes of new function. These methods rely on sequence similarity networks as an infrastrucure. Method refinement is achieved via experimental verification in collaborating labs.