Lecturer
Dr Xiaotao Jiang
Bachelor of Engineering (Bioinformatics)
Doctor of Philosophy (Water and Environmental Microbiology)
Medicine & Health
School of Clinical Medicine
My Current Research Interests:
1. Microbiome in health and diseases
2. Antimicrobial resistance
3. Virome
4. Microbiome bioinformatics
Dr. Jiang leads the bioinformatics unit at the MRC and has been involved in an extensive number of projects for the human microbiome and diseases including liver cancer, colon cancer, 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). Another interest of Dr Jiang is antimicrobial resistance. He is interested in developing methods to combat the ever-increasing issue of antimicrobial resistance from the medical applications.
My Background:
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.
Phone
+61 02 9113 2582
E-mail
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Recruiting Honour students for HOAM project 2023
Defining the Australian Optimal Healthy Microbiome (HOAM) through Artificial Intelligence
We are seeking talented ILP/honour students to join our ICONIC microbiome project: 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 (Impact Factor 19.89). 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).
Advisory topic board member for the journal Antibiotics
Editor on board of Gut
Member of Australian bioinformatics and computational society (ABACBS)
My Research Supervision
Dr Jiang currently supervise honour students on topics of virome, healthy microbiome and disease.