Xiaofang Jiang

Principal Investigator since 2019

Research areas

  • Microbial genomics
  • Microbiome metagenomics
  • SARS-CoV-2
  • Bioinformatics

Education

  • BS: Wuhan University, Life Science (2006-2010)
  • PhD: Virginia Tech, Genetics, Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (2011-2016)
  • Postdoc: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2016-2019)
Xiaofang Jiang

Background

I have a broad interest in genomics and bioinformatics. During my Ph.D., I investigated the genomics and transcriptomics of mosquitoes. I tackled several interesting questions on mosquito biology including verifying dosage compensation, discovering trans-splicing in mosquitoes, disentangling the enigmatic Anopheline phylogeny, and identifying the gene determining the sex of mosquitoes. During my postdoctoral training at MIT and the Broad Institute, I developed a new tool to identify and quantify the orientations of invertible DNA regions, called PhaseFinder, and a new method to identify the exact edges of mobile genetic elements to better track the horizontal transfer of genes through the human microbiome.

I believe that the most important criterion of success for bioinformatics algorithms is being able to solve real biological problems. At the National Library of Medicine, we are particularly interested in the hypothesis-driven investigation of specific biological problems, such as the identification of key genes associated with phenotypic changes, tracking the spread and evolution of microbes and viruses, prediction of biological interactions, and modeling molecular pathways.

Papers from time in Jiang lab

  1. Braccia DJ, Jiang X, Pop M, Hall AB. 2021. The Capacity to Produce Hydrogen Sulfide (H2S) via Cysteine Degradation Is Ubiquitous in the Human Gut Microbiome. Frontiers in Microbiology. 12: 705583. DOI: 10.3389/fmicb.2021.705583.
  2. Mou Z, Yang Y, Hall AB, Jiang X. 2021. The Taxonomic Distribution of Histamine-Secreting Bacteria in the Human Gut Microbiome. BMC Genomics. 22: 695. DOI: 10.1186/s12864-021-08004-3.
  3. Yang Y, Yan W, Hall AB, Jiang X. 2021. Characterizing Transcriptional Regulatory Sequences in Coronaviruses and Their Role in Recombination. Molecular Biology and Evolution. 38: 1241-1248. DOI: 10.1093/molbev/msaa281.
  4. Fontenele RS, Kraberger S, Hadfield J, Driver EM, Bowes D, Holland LA, Faleye TOC, Adhikari S, Kumar R, Inchausti R, Holmes WK, Deitrick S, Brown P, Duty D, Smith T, Bhatnagar A, Yeager RA 2nd, Holm RH, von Reitzenstein NH, Wheeler E, Dixon K, Constantine T, Wilson MA, Lim ES, Jiang X, Halden RU, Scotch M, Varsani A. 2021. High-Throughput Sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 in Wastewater Provides Insights into Circulating Variants. Water Research. 205: 117710. DOI: 10.1016/j.watres.2021.117710.
  5. Dufault-Thompson K, Hall AB, Jiang X. 2022. Taxonomic Distribution and Evolutionary Analysis of the Equol Biosynthesis Gene Cluster. BMC Genomics. 23: 1. DOI: 10.1186/s12864-022-08426-7.
  6. Yang Y, Dufault-Thompson K, Fontenele RS, Jiang X. 2022. Putative Host-Derived Insertions in the Genomes of Circulating SARS-CoV-2 Variants. mSystem. DOI: 10.1128/msystems.00179-22.
  7. Yan W, Hall AB, Jiang X. 2022. Bacteroidales Species in the Human Gut Are a Reservoir of Antibiotic Resistance Genes Regulated by Invertible Promoters. Npj Biofilms and Microbiomes. 8: 1. DOI: 10.1038/s41522-021-00260-1.
  8. Olejniczak M, Jiang X, Basczok MM, Storz G. 2022. KH Domain Proteins: Another Family of Bacterial RNA Matchmakers. Molecular Microbiology. 117: 10-19. DOI: 10.1111/mmi.14842.
  9. Dufault-Thompson K, Jiang X. 2022. Applications of de Bruijn Graphs in Microbiome Research. iMeta. 1: e4. DOI: 10.1002/imt2.4.
  10. Zhang X, Wang R, Xie X, Hu Y, Wang J, Sun Q, Feng X, Lin W, Tong S, Yan W, Wen H, Wang M, Zhai S, Sun C, Wang F, Niu Q, Kropinski A M, Cui Y, Jiang X, Peng S, Li S, Tong Y. 2022. Mining bacterial NGS data vastly expands the complete genomes of temperate phages. NAR genomics and bioinformatics. 4: lqac057. DOI: 10.1093/nargab/lqac057.
  11. Braccia D J, Ndjite G M, Weiss A, Levy S, Abeysinghe S, Jiang X, Pop M, Hall B. 2022. Gut microbiome-wide search for bacterial azoreductases reveals potentially uncharacterized azoreductases encoded in the human gut microbiome. Drug Metabolism and Disposition. DOI: 10.1124/dmd.122.000898.
  12. Fontenele RS, Yang Y, Driver EM, Magge A, Kraberger S, Custer JM, Dufault-Thompson K, Cox E, Newell ME, Varsani A, Halden RU, Scotch M, Jiang X. 2023. Wastewater surveillance uncovers regional diversity and dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 variants across nine states in the USA. Sci Total Environ.. 877: 162862. DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.162862.
  13. Zhong A, Jiang X, Hickman AB, Klier K, Teodoro GIC, Dyda F, Laub TM, Storz S. 2023. Toxic antiphage defense proteins inhibited by intragenic antitoxin proteins. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 120: e2307382120. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2307382120.
  14. Yang Y, Jiang X. 2023. Evolink: A Phylogenetic Approach for Rapid Identification of Genotype-Phenotype Associations in Large-scale Microbial Multi-Species Data. Bioinformatics. DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btad215.
  15. Hall B, Levy S, Dufault-Thompson K, Arp G, Zhong A, Ndjite GM, Weiss A, Braccia D, Jenkins C, Yang Y, Arp G, Abeysinghe S, Jermain M, Wu CH, Jiang X. 2024. BilR is a gut microbial enzyme that reduces bilirubin to urobilinogen. Nature Microbiology. 9: 173-184. DOI: 10.1038/s41564-023-01549-x.