Ben Rubin

The Rubin lab is focused on developing and applying DNA editing to understand and control microbial communities.

Gene modifications have previously been confined to single species of microorganisms isolated from their diverse natural consortia, even though most of the microbes that matter for health, agriculture, the climate, and industry live in mixed species communities. As a postdoctoral fellow in Professor Jennifer Doudna’s lab, Rubin and colleagues created technologies that enable CRISPR-Cas editing of microbiomes. As part of the Berkeley Initiative for Optimized Microbiome Editing (BIOME) at the IGI, the Rubin lab continues to develop this platform while working with collaborators to apply microbial community editing tools on varied types of microbiomes, such as those residing in human guts, cow rumens, and plant roots. Microbiome modifications are essential for understanding microbes and their interactions in natural environments and enabling control of microbial communities crucial to human and planetary health.