APAF- Biomedical Node of the Australian Proteome Analysis Facility

The school hosts an excellent proteomic facility which consists of a gel lab, mass spectrometry lab and bioinformatics suite.

In the gel lab there are facilities for running & blotting a wide variety of 1 & 2 dimensional gels as well as a laser based gel imaging system for scanning fluorescently stained or tagged gels such as Sypro Ruby or CyDyes. The mass spectrometry lab is equipped with a Voyager DE STR MALDI-TOF instrument for whole protein mass determination and peptide mass fingerprint analysis and a QSTAR XL hybrid instrument which can either be configured with a MALDI source for, de novo sequencing, phosphor protein and glycol protein analysis and providing extra capacity peptide mass fingerprint analysis or configured with an electrospray source for LC-ESI analysis (‘shotgun’ proteomics). Also in the mass spec lab is an Agilent 1100 HPLC system, which can be connected to a robotic system to enable the LC-MALDI analysis to complement the LC-ESI work flow, and a spot excision robot used in conjunction with a liquid handling robot for automated excision and processing of samples from gels of peptide mass fingerprinting. Lastly in the bioinformatics suite is our in-house MASCOT server running a range of public databases as well as a number of custom made databases and several computers for the analysis of 1 & 2 dimensional gels and mass spectrometry data.