Dr. agr. Helmut Fuchs

Dr. Helmut Fuchs is the Scientific and Technical Head of the German Mouse Clinic (GMC) since 2001. He works in mouse genetics for more than 20 years. He has a strong background in mouse phenotyping and mouse genetics including the know-how to handle large-scale research projects.

Helmut Fuchs received his degree in agricultural sciences at the Technical University in Munich, and did his PhD in a combined effort with the institutes of Animal Breeding, Molecular Genetics and Fish Biology to study genetic diversity and evolution of local fish populations.

Helmut joined Helmholtz Munich in 1997. Between 1997 and 2001, he was in charge of the Dysmorphology Screen within the Munich ENU Mouse Mutagenesis Project and established and characterized more than 400 mouse mutant lines, including new model systems for a wide spectrum of diseases such as brittle bone disease, dwarfism, deafness, skin diseases or ALS.

Starting from 2000, he accompanied the construction of the German Mouse Clinic where the GMC-team runs standardized, large-scale mouse phenotyping projects, and established the world-wide first mouse phenotyping pipeline, which served as a template for many other following mouse clinics in the world, and which was the basis for further important developments in this field of research. In 2015 the GMC II was opened up that was designed and constructed based on the GMC’s long standing experiences in this field as a complex phenotyping and laboratory system.

Helmut Fuchs and his colleague Valerie Gailus-Durner developed together with their director Martin Hrabe de Angelis the German Mouse Clinic as the first mouse clinic world-wide, that has become one of the world-leading mouse phenotyping centers. Within the last 20 years, more than 400 mouse mutant lines have been phenotyped, either in the framework of international programs (e.g. EUMODIC, IMPC) or as collaborations with other research institutions. Thereby new mouse models for a variety of diseases have been developed that may serve as potential drug targets.

Dr. Helmut Fuchs has a strong background in genetics and genomics, and more than 20 years expertise in running large-scale mouse phenotyping projects on the national and international level (e.g. as member of Infrafrontier and the International Mouse Phenotyping consortium, IMPC).

As an expert for mouse phenotyping, the GMC’s collaboration partners benefit from his consulting on how to plan and design a phenotyping experiment. The data from the GMC is the basis for Artificial Intelligence projects, and he is engaged to further develop the analysis strategies for large-scale genetics data. These activities also contribute to 3R strategies of the GMC.

Mouse phenotypingLarge-scale functional genomics/geneticsPleiotropy and genetic interactionBone metabolism and morphologyExperimental designDevelopment of new strategies for the analysis of large scale phenotyping data