Professor Thomas Preiss

John Curtin School of Medical Research

ANU College of Health and Medicine

Thomas Preiss is Professor of RNA Biology, Co-Head of the Genome Science and Cancer Division and Director of the Shine-Dalgarno Centre for RNA Innovation at the John Curtin School of Medical Research.

Professor Preiss is a molecular biologist determining the mechanisms and transcriptome-wide patterns of eukaryotic mRNA translation as one of life’s core processes and its regulation by RNA-binding proteins and non-coding RNA as a means of controlling gene activity.

He joined the translational control field in 1995 as a postdoctoral scientist and has since had a particular focus on mechanisms of translation initiation using yeast and mammalian cells and cell-free translation systems as his preferred models.

In addition to his mechanistic work, Professor Preiss also studies global patterns of post-transcriptional control using microarray and next-gen sequencing-based methods. After starting his own group, he continued to investigate the role of the mRNA cap and poly(A) tail and associated protein factors in determining mRNA utilisation. These studies overlap with work on the discovery of miRNA targets and the unravelling of their mechanism of action.

Employing next gen-sequencing technology (RNAseq), his group is further pursuing interests in the area of RNA (mRNA, miRNA, tRNA, other noncoding RNA) processing, modification, polyadenylation and utilisation.