Dr Xiaotao Jiang | UNSW Research

My Expertise

Microbiome

Bioinformatics and Next/Third-Generation Sequencing

Metagenomics

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR)

Keywords

antimicrobial resistance

microbiome

metagenomics

bioinformatics

Fields of Research (FoR)

Medical Microbiology, Microbial Ecology, Microbial Systematics, Taxonomy and Phylogeny, Bioinformatics, Bioinformatics Software

SEO tags

Expanding Knowledge in the Medical and Health Sciences

Biography

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...view more

My Current Research Interests:

1. Microbiome in health and diseases

2. Antimicrobial resistance

3. Virome

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 bioinformatics algorithms 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-OAP to obtain the quantitative profiling of resistome for multiple shotgun metagenomics data, which is widely used in the AMR area.

My Grants

_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.}

My Qualifications

Bachelor of Engineering (Bioinformatics)

Doctor of Philosophy (Water and Environmental Microbiology)

My Research Activities

Defining the Healthy Optimal Australian Microbiome (HOAM) through Artificial Intelligence

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.

The project is led by Prof. Emad EI-Omar and Dr Xiaotao Jiang. Prof. EI-Omar is a word class scientist in gastroenterology and microbiome, he is the director of MRC and Chief Editor of the Journal GUT. Dr Xiaotao Jiang is the lead bioinformatician of MRC, he had over 10 years’ experience in microbiome bioinformatics and next-generation sequencing.

If you have interest in joining this exciting project, please contact either Dr Xiaotao Jiang (xiaotao.jiang@unsw.edu.au) or Prof. EI-Omar (e.el-omar@unsw.edu.au).

My Research Supervision

Supervision keywords

metagenomics

next generation sequencing

bioinformatics

antimicrobial resistance

virome

microbiome

Areas of supervision

ILP, Hons and PhD student

Two PhD projects are now actively recruiting students :

1. Combating antimicrobial resistance (AMR) using Australian human metagenomics big data and novel antimicrobial peptides

2. Boosting human health in obesity and dementia through Multi-Omics defined Healthy Optimal Australian Microbiome (HOAM) and Fecal Microbiome Transplant using Super donors.