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BGU Student Receives Presidential Grant

BGU Student Receives Presidential Grant

July 18, 2014

Desert & Water Research

Gil Eshel, a Ph.D. student in BGU’s Albert Katz International School for Desert Studies at the Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research is one of the recipients of this year’s President of the State of Israel Scientific Excellence and Innovation grants.

The NIS 200,000 (about $58,600) grant over three years was awarded this year to researchers at Israeli institutions in the fields of agriculture, environment and water. Each year, the president chooses the field of scientific research. This is the second year that the grants are being given.

Gil Eshel with President Shimon Peres (Photo: Mark Neyman/GPO)

Gil Eshel with President Shimon Peres (Photo: Mark Neyman/GPO)

The Scientific Excellence and Innovation grants are given to encourage education and quality academic research, to highlight various scientific fields, to raise public awareness of the purposes and fields in which the grants are given, to incentivize scientific research, and to promote scientific excellence and innovation in Israel.

On the combined track program, Eshel is studying the adaptations of desert plants to harsh environmental conditions. He is focusing on the Negev desert plant, Anastatica hierochuntica, which is a relative of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana.

During his M.Sc. at BGU, which he graduated cum laude, Eshel generated, sequenced and assembled a reference Anastatica transcriptome (all the genes that are expressed in various plant tissues, under several abiotic stress conditions). This is the first transcriptome of a plant species from the Negev desert, and one of the first desert plants ever to be sequenced.

In addition, he analyzed the metabolic profile of this species under salt stress conditions, and compared it to Arabidopsis, which is salt-sensitive, and another relative species Thellungiella (Eutrema) salsuginea, a salt-tolerant species that can survive and complete its life cycle in highly saline conditions.

“My research goal is to characterize the response of this plant to a combination of enviromental stresses,” Eshel says. “I hope that my study results will help with the effort of improving crop stress tolerance, and will facilitate our ability to grow crop plants in harsh conditions such as those found in the Negev desert.”

Eshel, age 32, attended BGU for his B.A. and M.Sc. and continued on for his Ph.D. under the supervision of Dr. Simon Barak, Dr. Shirli Bar-David and Dr. Aaron Fait. He lives at Midreshet Ben-Gurion with his wife Tamara and his daughter Noa. Growing up in the Negev, he’s always loved, and been fascinated by, the desert.