Hasan Khatib

Hasan Khatib is a professor of genetics and epigenetics. He earned his BS in Biology, MS in Human Genetics, and Ph.D.in Genetics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Afterward, he worked in the Department of Genetics at the Hebrew University as a post-doctoral fellow and as a research scientist.

Dr. Khatib currently has over 100 peer-reviewed publications in the areas of embryonic development, male fertility, production traits, epigenetics, and nutritional epigenetics. His papers have appeared in the BMC Genomics, PloS one, Science, Genome Research, Animal Genetics, Journal of Dairy Science, Journal of Animal Science, Mammalian Genome, Epigenetics and other journals.

His research focuses on understanding the contributions of epigenetics to production, reproduction, and health traits. More specifically, his research examines the transgenerational epigenetic effects of paternal and maternal nutrition on phenotypes of the next generations in livestock. His group recently demonstrated that DNA methylation patterns in the sperm were affected by a paternal diet and were transgenerationally inherited by subsequent generations in sheep. He is also interested in identifying epigenetic markers as predictors of embryo development and fertility using non-invasive methods. Research methods used in his lab include embryo production, transcriptomics, whole-genome bisulfite sequencing, cell culture, gene editing, and epigenome editing. Dr. Khatib is the editor of the books “Livestock Epigenetics” and “Molecular and Quantitative Animal Genetics.