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Dr Jean Giacomotto

Honorary Senior Fellow

Queensland Brain Institute
j.giacomotto@uq.edu.au

Overview

Dr Giacomotto, NHMRC Emerging Leader, is a young group leader focusing on translational research, genes and diseases, imaging/automatic systems, drug discovery, chemical biology, and medical applications. His work focuses on translating little discoveries made in a single cell or in a model organism to applications or treatments for humans. He has already made discoveries that benefit human health, such as treatment for muscular dystrophies. He is working with a wide diversity of models, including cell lines and mouse models, but he recently spent a lot of time working with the zebrafish model. He believes that this small fish will have an important impact on the seek of treatments for neuromuscular and neurological disorders. Those diseases are very difficult to reproduce in a single cell, making the search for chemical treatments difficult. This fish opens a new avenue for the screening of bioactive compounds and for understanding the progression of these terrible disorders. He believes in translational research, the zebrafish is for him a fantastic complementary model to cell lines in order to recapitulate human diseases and run large-scale experiments. He is working on developing future therapeutical strategies to alleviate the suffering of human patients.

Dr Giacomotto recently established his group at Griffith Research Institute for Drug Discovery (Discovery Biology, Griffith University) and remain an active honorary fellow of the Queensland Brain Institute (The University of Queensland). Dr Giacomotto is currently recruiting. Don't hesitate to contact him for further information.

Dr Giacomotto Laboratory Website

Research Impacts

more to come.

Qualifications

  • Doctor of Philosophy, UCBL

Publications

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Grants

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Supervision

View all Supervision

Available Projects

  • Unveiling the pathogenicity of genes recently associated with mental disorders

    Our laboratory uses diverse state-of-the-art approaches to try understanding and developing new drugs for mental disorders and Schizophrenia in particular. We start from Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS) for identifying risk-genes to further study their role in cell lines and animal models. We are currently establishing a pipeline aiming to use the zebrafish animal model to test/observe the neuropathogenicity of the identified gene candidates in regard to brain structure and function. We have position for candidates aiming at learning genome editing techniques such as CRISPR/Cas9 and high-end microscopy. These projects are of high potential and should lead to post-PhD project/appointment and high impact publications. In the long term, this work aims at better understanding the mechanisms involved in the onset, progress and severity of mental disorders. The candidates would benefit from a very highly competitive environment, with international expert and collaborations in the feild.

  • Drug discovery and big pharma partnership to find new neuroactive drugs

    The zebrafish is becoming is prime model for drug discovery. We have been leader in the use of small animal models in drug discovery, and may be some of the very first from identification of a compound in the lab to a drug in clinics. Small animal models such as the zebrafish are compatible with industrial drug discovery techniques such as High Throughput Screening (HTS). We are working at recapitulating human diseases in this organism and try to establish models with early phenotype that can be observed/quantified through automatic readout. We have for instance developed versatile models of neurodegeneration that could help identify/develop drugs against neurodegenerative and motor neuron diseases. We have a set of projects aiming at either i) developing new models that would fit our screening pipeline and/or ii) using the current models to run drug discovery programs and translation (mouse validation via collabs). These projects are strongly bond with the pharma industry and highly collaborative which would be ideal for candidates aiming to join the industry or work in a multidisciplinary environment.

    See attached link for example (https://sites.google.com/view/giacomotto-lab/areas-of-interest?authuser=0)

  • Developing models of motor neuron disease

    Our third research direction aims at developping models of motor neuron degeneration or neurodegeneration per se. This project takes benefit of collaborations of excellence and aims at better understanding the pathogenic mechanisms that could trigger or modulate neurodegeneration. This project is also working synergistically with our drug discovery programs to try finding compounds/drugs able to reduce or stop neurodegenetion. It is noteworthy that this program is bond to laboratories in Europe and North America, garanteeing a highly productive environment, travel opportunuities as well as postdoc options post-PhD. Interestingly, we would have great funding opportunuities for the right candidate and fellowship option post-PhD, which would help tremendously in career development.

    https://sites.google.com/view/giacomotto-lab/home?authuser=0

View all Available Projects

Publications

Featured Publications

Journal Article

Conference Publication

  • Re-evaluating the nirvana cabal deployed by piscivorous cone snails

    Dutt, Mriga, Giacomotto, Jean, Ragnarsson, Lotten, Andersson, Asa, Brust, Andreas, Deakan, Zoltan, Alewood, Paul F. and Lewis, Richard J. (2020). Re-evaluating the nirvana cabal deployed by piscivorous cone snails. 20th World Congress of the International Society on Toxinology, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 8-13 September 2019. Oxford, United Kingdom: Elsevier. doi: 10.1016/j.toxicon.2019.10.044

  • First genome-wide association study of schizophrenia in an Indian population reveals a novel susceptibility locus

    Periyasamy, Sathish, John, Sujit, Padmavati, Raman, Rajendren, Preeti, Thirunavukkarasu, Priyadarshini, Gratten, Jacob, Holliday, Elizabeth, Bakshi, Andrew, Jorde, Lynn, Brown, Matthew, Wray, Naomi, Suetani, Rachel, Giacomotto, Jean, Thara, Rangaswamy and Mowry, Bryan (2019). First genome-wide association study of schizophrenia in an Indian population reveals a novel susceptibility locus. 26th World Congress of Psychiatric Genetics (WCPG), Glasgow, Scotland, 11-15 October 2018. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Elsevier . doi: 10.1016/j.euroneuro.2018.08.017

PhD and MPhil Supervision

Current Supervision

Completed Supervision

Possible Research Projects

Note for students: The possible research projects listed on this page may not be comprehensive or up to date. Always feel free to contact the staff for more information, and also with your own research ideas.

  • Unveiling the pathogenicity of genes recently associated with mental disorders

    Our laboratory uses diverse state-of-the-art approaches to try understanding and developing new drugs for mental disorders and Schizophrenia in particular. We start from Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS) for identifying risk-genes to further study their role in cell lines and animal models. We are currently establishing a pipeline aiming to use the zebrafish animal model to test/observe the neuropathogenicity of the identified gene candidates in regard to brain structure and function. We have position for candidates aiming at learning genome editing techniques such as CRISPR/Cas9 and high-end microscopy. These projects are of high potential and should lead to post-PhD project/appointment and high impact publications. In the long term, this work aims at better understanding the mechanisms involved in the onset, progress and severity of mental disorders. The candidates would benefit from a very highly competitive environment, with international expert and collaborations in the feild.

  • Drug discovery and big pharma partnership to find new neuroactive drugs

    The zebrafish is becoming is prime model for drug discovery. We have been leader in the use of small animal models in drug discovery, and may be some of the very first from identification of a compound in the lab to a drug in clinics. Small animal models such as the zebrafish are compatible with industrial drug discovery techniques such as High Throughput Screening (HTS). We are working at recapitulating human diseases in this organism and try to establish models with early phenotype that can be observed/quantified through automatic readout. We have for instance developed versatile models of neurodegeneration that could help identify/develop drugs against neurodegenerative and motor neuron diseases. We have a set of projects aiming at either i) developing new models that would fit our screening pipeline and/or ii) using the current models to run drug discovery programs and translation (mouse validation via collabs). These projects are strongly bond with the pharma industry and highly collaborative which would be ideal for candidates aiming to join the industry or work in a multidisciplinary environment.

    See attached link for example (https://sites.google.com/view/giacomotto-lab/areas-of-interest?authuser=0)

  • Developing models of motor neuron disease

    Our third research direction aims at developping models of motor neuron degeneration or neurodegeneration per se. This project takes benefit of collaborations of excellence and aims at better understanding the pathogenic mechanisms that could trigger or modulate neurodegeneration. This project is also working synergistically with our drug discovery programs to try finding compounds/drugs able to reduce or stop neurodegenetion. It is noteworthy that this program is bond to laboratories in Europe and North America, garanteeing a highly productive environment, travel opportunuities as well as postdoc options post-PhD. Interestingly, we would have great funding opportunuities for the right candidate and fellowship option post-PhD, which would help tremendously in career development.

    https://sites.google.com/view/giacomotto-lab/home?authuser=0

  • Short term, long term and transgenerational effect of current antipsychotic and antidepressant medications.

    We are looking at studying the short term as well as the long term and transgenerational transcriptomic effect of current antipsychotic and antidepressant medications. This would be done using hte zebrafish animal models.

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Links

ResearcherID: C-1613-2013

ORCID: 0000-0002-2918-4689

Scopus ID: 14031309500

Personal Profile: Link

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