Jia Li

Research Interests

Systems biology modelling of personalised surgical outcomes

Obesity and associated diseases such as diabetes and heart diseases have become a major cause of mortality in the developed world. Application of metabonomics and functional metagenomics in bariatric surgery is to elucidate gut microbial metabolism and speciation changes that occur following bariatric surgery in morbidly obese individuals and to establish the functional role of gut microbiome alteration in post surgical weight loss, particularly with respect to possible linkages to post-operative reduction in insulin resistance and severity of type 2 diabetes. Emphasis is placed on discovery of new functional biomarkers of surgical outcome success and the role of host-microbial co-metabolism changes and bile acid modulation resulting from surgery.

Mammalian-microbial interactions

The research focus is monitoring changes of microbial composition in relation to drug interventions, infectious diseases, obesity and diabetes using PCR-DGGE and 454 sequencing techniques. Metabolic profiles of biofluids are subsequently correlated with metagenomic profiles in order to investigate the mammalian-microbial interaction.

Metabonomics in plants and traditional medicine

Various analytical tools-based metabolic profiling strategies have been demonstrated to be a robust approach to investigate global metabolic alterations in plants induced by various environmental factors such as salt stress and drought. My research focus on the metabolic effect of salt, peroxide  and drought on Maize and rice.

Application of metabonomic strategy in traditional plant medicine analysis is to evaluate the quality and variation amongst different batches of traditional Chinese and African plant medicine with an emphasis on identification of impurities and in establishing association between metabolic components and product efficacy.

Characterisation of host-parasite interactions

Characterisation of host-parasite interactions using metabolic profiling is newly applied in parasitology. My research focuses on dynamic metabolic responses of hosts to several parasitic diseases (malaria, schistosomiasis and trypanosomiasis) in mouse models using NMR spectroscopy and UPLC-MS based metabonomic profiling approaches, together with multivariate data analysis methods.