Dr Xiaotao Jiang
Bachelor of Engineering (Bioinformatics)
Doctor of Philosophy (Water and Environmental Microbiology)
My Current Research Interests:
1. Microbiome in health and diseases
2. Antimicrobial resistance
3. Virome
Dr. Jiang leads the theme of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) at the Microbiome Research Centre. As a Chief Investigator (CI) on the NHMRC Synergy grant, Dr. Jiang leads the multi-omics analysis for the gut-lung axis.
Dr. Jiang leads the Healthy Optimal Australian Microbiome Project (HOAM) to define the multi-omics healthy microbiome under the supervision of MRC Director Prof. Emad El-Omar. With the awarded NSW Health grant and the Ageing Future Institute seed grant, Dr. Jiang is applying the optimal healthy microbiome to further interventions in obesity, healthy ageing, and dementia through fecal microbiota transplant (FMT). Developing an novel system for automatical super donors detection for FMT.
As the lead bioinformatician at MRC, Dr. Jiang leads a team of bioinformaticians collaborating nationally and internationally on a wide range of microbiome projects, including liver cancer, colon cancer, lung cancer, T1D, IBD, schizophrenia et. al. He is interested in developing bioinformaticsalgorithms and software to analyze next/third generation sequencing data for multi-omics data (metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, and metabolomics).
Dr Jiang completed his PhD at The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. In his PhD study, he applied large-scale metagenomics sequencing to understand the activated sludge microbial ecology in a spatial and temporal dimension. He developed ARGs-OAPto obtainthe quantitative profiling of resistome for multiple shotgun metagenomicsdata, which is widely used in the AMR area.
- Publications
- Media
- Grants
- Awards
- Research Activities
- Engagement
- Teaching and Supervision
1. Using state-of-the-art multi-omics to optimise selection of Faecal Microbiota Transplant (FMT) super donors for treatment of obesity and dementia.NSW Health Early-Middle Career Grant for Microbiomics,$499,335.20. CIA. 2023-2026
2. Defining an antiaging microbiome through the optimal healthy microbiome. Ageing Future Institute seed funding, 25,200 AUD. CIA, 2023
3.Defining the role and therapeutic manipulation of the gut-lung axis in respiratory disease. NHMRC Synergy grant, 5M AUD. CII, 2022-2026.
Healthy Optimal Australian Microbiome (HOAM)
The Healthy Optimal Australian Microbiome (HOAM) project in the Australian First dedicated Microbiome Research Centre (MRC). This project is supported by Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF). This ambitious project aims to hunt the optimal healthy microbiome in the Australian population, which will be a crucial target to manipulate the microbiome to, especially for faecal microbiome transplant (FMT) to cure diseases.The microbiome plays an important role in human health and has been implicated in the pathogenesis of many diseases. However, the definition of a “normal microbiome” remains elusive. Previous definitions have focussed mainly on microbial taxonomy with less rigour in defining optimal health. We seek to define the healthy microbiome by studying supremely healthy individuals recruited through a stringent matrix and benchmarked against obesity and dementia patients. Meanwhile, we have established a huge publicly available human shotgun metagenomic microbiome data set of over 10,000 samples around 50 Tbs genetic data. This big data will be integrated and compared with our HOAM dataset with an artificial intelligence algorithm to define a healthy microbiome. MRC has established powerful high-performance computing facilities and use national computing infrastructure (NCI) to support the project.
In the second stage of this project, we apply healthy microbiome to boost health and do intervention agnist disease through dietary and fecal microbiota transplant. This project is supported by Dr Jiang Early Middle Career Research Grant supported by NSW Health, from which we will establish a super donor selection platform for FMT intervention in clinical trials for obesity and dementia using the multi-omics microbiome and host genetic data.
AussiResistome
This project is to establish the antimicrobial resistome of Australians, and importantly understand the drivers and consequences of elevated resistome on both chronic and acute diseases. The role of human reseistome in health and disease s has been investigated in descriptive studies, however, their roles for human health has not been understand well. In this program, we will obtain a full picture of how Aussi' antimicrobial resistome shaped in impact the health and diseases of Australians.
Novel Antimicrobial Peptides
Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are important but less studied novel antimicrobial, they play important role in shaping the microbiome communities with multi-fact functions beyond antimcrobials like regulate immune system, anticancer effects, et, al. We are working in a program to detect novel AMPs from human microbiome and investigate their role in health and diseases.
Advisory topic board member for the journal Antibiotics
Editor on board of Gut
Member ofAustralian bioinformatics and computational society (ABACBS)
My Research Supervision
Dr Jiang currently supervise honour student and PhD candidates on human microbiome, antimicrobial resistance and antimicrobial peptides.
I have supervised 7 honour students to finish.