Curious about how your body tells time and why it matters for your health?
In our lab, we study how biological clocks coordinate daily rhythms in behavior, physiology, and metabolism. These internal timekeepers play a central role in energy balance, disease risk, and the body’s ability to adapt to environmental changes. We apply a multidisciplinary approach combining molecular biology, physiology, and high-throughput omics to explore how the circadian clock shapes metabolic function across tissues and timescales.
The Asher Lab is one of the leading groups in the field of circadian clocks and metabolism. We foster a friendly and collaborative environment and are equipped with advanced experimental tools and genetic models. Located at the Weizmann Institute of Science, we benefit from world-class core facilities and a vibrant international community of scientists.
We are always looking for curious and motivated students to join us. Whether your interests lie in wet-lab experiments, bioinformatics, or systems physiology, we offer the tools and mentorship to help you grow.
Our current research topics include:
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Circadian control of metabolism: We explore how the clock regulates metabolic pathways in liver and muscle, using high-resolution transcriptomic and metabolomic profiling to uncover rhythmic gene expression, metabolite levels, and pathway activity across the day.
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Liver-lung communication & hypoxia: In our most recent work, we demonstrated that hepatic BMAL1 and HIF-1α coordinate the liver’s response to hypoxia in a time-of-day–dependent manner, and protect against hepatopulmonary syndrome (HPS) (Dandavate et al., Cell Metabolism, 2024).
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Exercise and the clock: We are investigating how time of day influences exercise capacity and training efficiency, and how factors like feeding state, chronotype, and hypoxia interact with this regulation. This work builds on recent findings that exercise elicits time-specific transcriptional and metabolic signatures, including the circadian regulation of ZMP, an AMPK activator (Ezagouri et al., Cell Metabolism, 2019; Adamovich et al., PNAS, 2021).
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Oxygen and circadian rhythms: We have shown that low-amplitude oxygen cycles can reset the circadian clock via HIF-1α (Adamovich et al., Cell Metabolism, 2017), and that hypoxia, such as occurs in sleep apnea, causes circadian misalignment across organs (Manella et al., PNAS, 2020). In collaboration with high-altitude researchers, we also studied human circadian rhythms at 5,300 meters in La Rinconada, Peru (Manella et al., Cell Reports, 2022).
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Clock resetting and entrainment: We developed Circa-SCOPE, a high-throughput platform to test the effects of various clock-resetting agents in parallel using live single-cell imaging. This tool enables both basic research and drug screening applications, with important implications for chronomedicine (Manella et al., Nature Communications, 2021).
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Clock-independent rhythms: We recently discovered ultradian phosphorylation cycles of AKT that persist even in the absence of environmental cues or a functional circadian clock. These rhythms appear to be endogenously generated and point to a novel layer of molecular timing (Aviram et al., PLOS Biology, 2021).
If you decide to join us, you’ll take the lead on a cutting-edge research project, combining experimental and computational biology in a supportive and dynamic scientific environment.
Contact information: Prof Gad Asher (gad.asher@weizmann.ac.il) or Dr. Yaarit Adamovich (yaarit.adamovich@weizmann.ac.il).