Professor Timothy Mercer

Tim Mercer specialises in genomics, transcriptomics and synthetic biology.

Professor Timothy Mercer is a Group Leader at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN) at The University of Queensland where he is the Scientific Director of the BASE nucleic-acid synthesis facility. He also leads a diverse laboratory and bioinformatic research group into the expression and splicing of synthetic genes.

Prior to this, he was Group Leader at the Garvan Institute for Medical Research, Sydney, where he pioneered the use of synthetic RNA and DNA controls to improve the accuracy of clinical genome sequencing. He also developed targeted RNA sequencing approaches for the diagnosis of fusion genes in cancer. Together, this reflects his ongoing interest in the development of genome biotechnologies.

Before joining the Garvan, Tim Mercer has a PhD in Genomics from UQ and completed postdoctoral studies in transcriptomics, long-noncoding RNAs and splicing at Broad Institute, United States, Centre for Gene Regulation, Spain, and Max Plank Institute for Cell Biology, Germany.

Key Publications

​The role of testing during the COVID-19 pandemic. 
Nature Reviews Genetics (2021)

Evaluating the analytical validity of circulating tumor DNA sequencing assays for precision oncology. 
Nature Biotechnology (2021)

A universal and independent synthetic DNA ladder for the quantitative measurement of genomic features 
Nature Communications (2020)

Diagnosis of fusion genes using targeted RNA sequencing 
Nature Communications (2019)

Use of synthetic DNA spike-in controls (sequins) for human genome sequencing 
Nature Protocols (2019)

Full list of publications available on espace