Dr. Xiaoxiao Zhang
Lecturer
Rita Cornforth Fellow
email Xiaoxiao.Zhang1@anu.edu.au
link ANU Researcher Portal profile

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About

 

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Xiaoxiao obtained her PhD from a structural biology laboratory at the University of Queensland, where she combined protein biochemistry and structural biology to reveal protein structures of key proteins in plant and animal innate immunity. Xiaoxiao then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at CSIRO Agriculture & Food and further studied plant disease immunity in complex plant systems. She developed pipelines to investigate structural-hypothesis in plant-pathogen interactions and plant immune signalling and engineered chimeric proteins to reveal fundamental immune signalling mechanisms conserved across different biological contexts. Xiaoxiao then moved to the Research School of Biology at the Australian National University followed by a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) in 2021 from Australian Research Council to use synthetic biology to engineer novel disease resistance in cereal crops. Xiaoxiao is currently a Group Leader and Rita Cornforth Fellow in the Research School of Chemistry at ANU.

Affiliations

  Groups

Research interests

My research uses chemical and synthetic biology to engineer proteins and create novel protein functionality, integrating protein chemistry, biophysics, molecular biology and cell biology. We target immune receptor proteins involved in plant and animal innate immunity for identification of therapeutic targets in human diseases and development of disease resistant crops. My research aims to accelerate protein evolution and characterise protein interaction at scale. To do this, we reconstruct complex signalling pathways in synthetic cell systems such as yeast, and implement a continuous directed evolution platform which will mutate the protein of interest and track protein-protein interaction in real time. We then use high throughput next-gen sequencing techniques to map the protein interactome. My lab will use X-ray crystallography and cryo-EM to study and engineer higher-ordered immune signalling complexes, enabling further structural guided engineering of the immune receptors in general.

 

Awards

  • ANU SynBio Network Twist Grant 2022, “Incorporation of non-canonical amino acid to improve crop disease resistance”
  • Australian Academy of Science J.G. Russell Award 2021-2023
  • Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award 2021-2024
  • CSIRO Chairman’s Medal for Science Excellence awarded to the cereal rust disease prevention team
  • Shimamoto Travel Awards, IS-MPMI XVII Congress, Portland, Oregon, USA, 2016
  • High Impact Research Achievement Award - Simon Williams and the team (Thomas Ve, Li Wan, Xiaoxiao Zhang, Lachlan Casey, Bostjan Kobe), School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences (SCMB), University of Queensland, 2014
  • Rising Star Award, The 12th Conference of the Asian Crystallographic Association (AsCA’13), Hong Kong, 2013
  • ANZ Trustees Scholarship for Medical Research in Queensland, 2012-2014

 

Publications