Ruth Mackinnon Email & Phone Number

I have worked in molecular genomics, molecular cytogenomics and classical cytogenetics. My recent research has taken me on a journey of discovery into the secret life of centromeres in cancer. Secret because centromere identity is normally assumed based on surrounding morphology (classical cytogenetics) or ignored because they are difficult to characterise (sequence-based methods). I've developed a unique approach to characterising complex abnormal genomes that takes both chromosome structure and content into account.Nineteen of my 41 peer-reviewed papers are first author papers. I have also written three invited book chapters (two for the Springer / Humana Press Methods in Molecular Biology series).My illustrations were used on the covers of two journals: Genes, Chromosomes and Cancer and Cancer Genetics.I've won several poster prizes and my illustrations have been selected for use by various academic and mainstream publishers.I've dabbled in social media for communicating Science with some surprising outcomes. I was invited to speak (and show my breakage-fusion-bridge claymation) at the UK Cancer Genomics conference in 2014. An image from one of my blogs appears in the popular science book, The Serengeti Rules (Sean Carroll, Princeton University Press) and another blog image has been used by a text book publisher. I have a YouTube channel and a few blogs with different themes. In 2013 I commissioned a short film, Paper Thin, to raise awareness and funds for leukaemia research. My technical competence is demonstrated by my success introducing or developing techniques including in situ hybridisation in the early days (using tritiated single copy locus probes), chromosome microdissection and library creation, array CGH (Agilent platform) and DNA extraction from cytogenetic preparations. For disambiguation, my ORCID iD is 0000-0003-0294-5051

Listed skills include Cancer, Molecular Biology, Cytogenetics, Human Genetics, and 16 others.