NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Metabolomics Australia has opened the latest node in its network with the launch of its A$9.5 million ($6.3 million) center in Victoria at the University of Melbourne, the university said today.
The new facility will offer metabolomics services to researchers in academia and in industry studying medicine, agriculture, and the environment.
The Melbourne branch will focus on discovering biomarkers for disease, drug responsiveness, health and fitness, agriculturally important crop plant characteristics, and environmental stress response. The center will also assess the chemical profiles of patients and organisms in response to disease, genetic variation, or therapeutic treatments.
“With the help of powerful computing and improved software it will be possible to map metabolites onto known metabolic pathways and also identify novel pathways and networks of responses that will lead to the identification of the function of proteins/genes as well as the discovery of new biomarkers,” said Tony Bacic, platform convener for the Victorian node, in a statement.
The National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy provided A$5.3 million for the center, the Victorian government provided A$2.7 million, and the University of Melbourne is pitching in A$1.65 million.
Now complete, MA also has network nodes in Queensland at the University of Queensland, in South Australia at the Australian Wine Research Institute, and in Western Australia at the University of Western Australia and Murdoch University.