Affiliateship: 2021-2025
Cohort 6
Country (Nationality)
South Africa
Discipline
Biosciences
Bio
Dr. R van der Sluis completed her undergraduate qualifications and master’s degree in Genetics at the University of Pretoria. She started her career as a Senior Laboratory Technician in the Focus Area for Human Metabolomics (FHM) at the North-West University (NWU) in 2007. After working fulltime for three years, she enrolled for a PhD in Biochemistry in 2011. The successful completion of herPhD, resulted in a promotion to Subject Group specialist in Molecular Genetics in July 2015. She is currently a Senior Lecturer (promoted in 2017) and since 2019 she is also the Subject Group leader for Biochemistry. She is the principal investigator for two main research focus areas: The genetic and enzymatic characterisation of the phase II glycine conjugation pathway as well as the development of molecular diagnostic methods for application in animal breeding. The glycine conjugation pathway is involved in the metabolism of natural substrates as well as the detoxification of xenobiotics. They have registered a patent on the use of glycine N-acyltransferase as a therapeutic recombinant enzyme therapy. Furthermore, they were the first group to sequence the de novo genome of any Lovebird species and the first group to develop a parentage verification test for Lovebirds for which a patent application has been submitted. The Lovebird genome data also formed part of a big data article entitled “Dense sampling of bird diversity increases power of comparative genomics” that was published in Nature