Dr Mitchell Cummins

I am a postdoctoral research fellow in the lab of SHARP Professor of RNA Biology John Mattick (lab website https://www.lncrna.net/).

Our primary research focuses are cognition and intelligence, neuropsychiatric disorders, neurodevelopment, and evolution, and how brain lncRNAs drive/modify these (see https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-025-00960-z for our review of brain lncRNAs). To do this we combine bioinformatic (e.g. genome multi-alignment, DNA and RNA-sequencing analyses, SNP analyses), molecular (qPCR, Western blotting, RNA-seq, Mass-spec, CRISPR/Cas9 knockout, antisense oligonucleotide RNA knockdown, TREX), imaging (RNAscope, immunofluorescence) and behavioural phenotyping approaches.

Recently, we have combined analyses of GWAS complex trait-associated human haplotype blocks with syntenic mapping of lncRNAs between human and rodents, to identify trait-associated lncRNAs and rodent orthologs for functional analyses (https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.10.31.25339260, method https://github.com/Mitchell-Cummins/GWAS_trait_haplotype_blocks_lncRNA). Grants to test how cognition and intelligence-associated (Australian Research Council) and neuropsychiatric disorder-associated lncRNAs (National Health and Medical Research Council) modify associated behaviours were successfully funded, totalling ~$3 million in research funding.

I am also interested in the function of ultraconserved elements (UCEs) in animal genomes, especially in placental mammals (see http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msae146) and have co-designed a program to identify UCEs called dedUCE (https://github.com/slimsuite/deduce).

I completed my PhD(Anatomy) at the University of Newcastle under supervisor Associate Professor Doug Smith investigating the blood-brain barrier (see http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11357-024-01404-9), neuroimmune pathways, and transposable elements (https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-6165725/v1) in the aging CNS.