We want to introduce you to Prof. Ruth Arkell, member of Phenomics Australia’s Scientific Director’s team and Associate Director, Research Infrastructure, at the John Curtin School of Medical Research (JCSMR) at the Australian National University.
Meet Ruth:
Prof. Ruth Arkell leads a research group at the John Curtin School of Medical Research (JCSMR) at The Australian National University (ANU) that studies how genome and environmental variation impact embryonic development. Her science career began at the University of Sydney (BSc and Honours), before moving to the UK to undertake PhD and post-doctoral research and to establish a laboratory at the Mammalian Genetics Unit in Harwell, Oxfordshire, obtaining competitive Fellowships for all stages of her career. She was recruited to ANU’s Research School of Biological Sciences in 2006 and was awarded a Senior Viertel Medical Fellowship. In 2016 she moved within ANU to JCSMR.
Throughout her career, she has pioneered the use of the mouse as a model for precision health; she was involved in the sequencing of the mouse genome, mutagenesis screens to identify models of human disease and the development of whole-genome phenotyping tools, including transcription profiling. She has extensive experience with the academic leadership of research infrastructure in the UK and Australia. She is currently the academic lead for The Australian National University’s precision health platforms that includes Phenomics Australia activities in mouse biobanking, mouse genome targeting and in vitro modelling.
Inherently collaborative in her own research, she is an advocate for Australia’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure. Phenomics Australia is key to ensuring our research excellence, meeting our ambitions in precision health and addressing emerging biomedical research challenges.
Phenomics Australia provides a national centre of expertise and service provision to deploy a more comprehensive and sophisticated range of in vitro Genome Engineering and Disease Modelling capabilities to understand the functional consequences of DNA sequence variation in the human genome for health and disease while maintaining the expertise for in vivo disease modelling and genome engineering. To meet the high demand for adaptable and scalable disease-modelling platforms for improved diagnosis, Precision Medicine for genetic disorders, and therapeutic development by both academia and the biopharmaceutical industry, Phenomics Australia offers In Vitro services through a collaborative consortium of ten laboratories and facilities across Australia, operating at ANU (ANU Centre for Therapeutic Discovery), Perkins (Translational Cancer Research Program in Oncology), Monash (Monash Organoid Program & Monash Genome Modification Platform), MCRI (iPSC derivation & Gene Editing Facility), Peter Mac (Victorian Centre for Functional Genomics), UMelb (Centre for Stem Cell Systems & Stem Cell Disease Modelling Laboratory), UQ (In vitro Genome Engineering and Disease Modelling Service), and VCCRI (Stem Cell Production Facility)
Phenomics Australia provides a national centre of expertise and service provision to deploy CRISPR for increased speed, efficiency, and decreased cost for the production of animal strains carrying targeted mutations while maintaining the expertise for traditional transgenic technologies. To meet the high demand for this platform, Phenomics Australia offers genome editing services through five nodes across Australia, operating at Monash, ANU, ONJCRI, SAHMRI and PeterMac.
Supported by Phenomics Australia, the Australian Phenome Bank (APB) is both a physical repository and a database of genetically modified mouse strains used in medical research in Australia. The APB operates as a national infrastructure partnership between ANU and Monash and provides essential banking and distribution of mouse strains in Australia. The services of cryopreservation, storage, reanimation, distribution and importation are streamlined into packages to lower costs and protect research.
