Biography:

Xiaoteng joined the Toxicology Unit in Dec 2022, following completion of his PhD at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. During his PhD, he developed a Free-flow electrophoresis-based method to fractionate and enrich microbes from human saliva and characterised the signature differences of oral microbiome between lung cancer and healthy cohorts.

Research interests:

Xiaoteng is currently studying the dynamic of RNA-binding proteome in the gut microbiome under duloxetine, a well-used human-targeted antidepression drug. This drug can cause significant metabolic changes in gut bacteria and concomitant changes in growth characteristics, and that many of the bacterial enzymes affected are nucleotide binding.

This project is thus at the interface of omics technologies and computational biology and promises to deliver valuable information about the secondary, moonlighting function of bacterial proteins and the hitherto uncharacterised drug-binding capacity of these proteins. Drug binding not only has a detrimental impact on gut bacterial populations required for human health, but also significantly impacts the pharmacokinetics of drugs administered. Researchers are only just scratching the surface of these inter-relationships and hence this project is extremely timely, and adds a new dimension in terms of interactions that must be taken into consideration during the design of efficacious drugs.