Our state-of-the art amenities facilitate our world-class research
The Institute for Glycomics’ state-of-the art infrastructure and equipment, coupled with our expert scientific personnel, facilitates our world-class research.
Our impressive facilities, resources and services are also available to external research groups and industry.
Explore our facilities and resources below, and if you’d like more information on any of our services, please get in touch with our Business team: glycomicsbusiness@griffith.edu.au
Internal facility users
Internal, Griffith University users who would like to book our facilities can do so through the iLab application.
External facility users
Anyone external to Griffith University who would like to collaborate with the Institute for Glycomics and access our state-of-the-art facilities can get in touch with us via e-mail: glycomicsbusiness@griffith.edu.au
Glycobioanalytical Facility
Our Glycobioanalytical Facility includes the Glycomics Array Facility and a bioanalytical suite.
Advanced Mass Spectrometry Facility
A multi-million dollar investment by Griffith University allowed the establishment of a new glycomics and glycoproteomics focussed Advanced Mass Spectrometry Laboratory, embedded at the Institute for Glycomics.
Separations Science Facility
The Separations Science Facility provides an analytical service to internal and external clients.
Community Bank Paradise Point Flow Cytometry Facility
Our Community Bank Paradise Point Flow Cytometry Facility offers equipment and expertise for cell and particle analysis and sorting.
Bourne Foundation NMR Spectroscopy Facility
Our Bourne Foundation NMR Spectroscopy Facility includes the 400 MHz and 600 MHz Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectrometers, low-resolution mass spectrometer and an FTIR spectrometer.
Crystallography Facility
The Institute for Glycomics has dedicated facilities and equipment for crystallography studies that enable our scientists to better understand the three-dimensional structure of molecules found on the surface of microorganisms and their hosts.
Physical Containment/Biosecurity Containment Level 3 (PC3/BC3) Facility
ZymeBank
Recently established within the Institute for Glycomics, the ZymeBank facility provides enzymes that support both internal and external research projects. By cloning into various mammalian or bacterial expression vectors, ZymeBank is able to produce enzymes essential for glycan synthesis in high quality and purity. Activity assays have been developed to allow for in-depth characterisation of enzyme functions which guides enzyme use in downstream applications such as chemo-enzymatic synthesis. Currently, a range of human and bacterial sialyltransferases and fucosyltransferases have been expressed and characterised. Enzymes for sugar-nucleotide biosynthesis and nucleotide triphosphate regeneration are also available. We currently have nearly 30 enzymes in stock, and this number is growing rapidly. ZymeBank also provides technical support in molecular cloning, expression, purification, and assay development.
ZymeBank offers:
- ready to use enzymes
- expression plasmids (in-house cloned)
- molecular cloning
- protein expression and purification
- assay development
For further enquiries about our ZymeBank facility please get in touch with us: glycomicsbusiness@griffith.edu.au
Computational Chemistry and Visualisation
Our Computational Chemistry and Visualisation capacity enables biomolecular simulations to visualise and understand molecular interactions at an atomic level to facilitate structure-based drug discovery in a range of therapeutic areas.
The facility is supported by workstations with software for computing (YASARA, GROMOS, GROMACS, AMBER, GAMESS-US, Gaussian and Autodock) and visualisation (Chimera, VMD, PyMol, Swiss-PDB, Molden and Molekel). In addition, 3D-visualisation is supported by a visualisation suite using an exclusive 3D projector system. The computing resources include access to the Griffith 6 Node (432 core) HPC Cluster with NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs.
The facility offers:
- Biomolecular simulations employing molecular dynamics, quantum mechanical and free energy calculations
- Refinement and validation of X-ray and NMR structures
- Investigating drug/glycan-protein interactions and glycoprotein structures
- Virtual screening of compound libraries including ΔΔG-guided lead optimisation
- Structure-based drug design
For further enquiries about our Computational Chemistry and Visualisation facility please get in touch with us: glycomicsbusiness@griffith.edu.au
Wide-ranging resources
Some of our other facilities include:
Irradiation facility
Advanced microscopy and imaging
PC2, PC3 and GMP-compliant laboratories
In vivo models
We have in-house access to a range of in vivo models and a substantial, fully staffed facility, including PC2 and PC3 suites. We also have animal models for autoimmune inflammatory diseases.
Clinical samples and cell lines
We have a growing number of clinical samples and novel cell-lines relevant to infectious diseases and cancer research.