La Trobe specs its mass

By Kate McDonald
Tuesday, 14 October, 2008


La Trobe University has launched its new mass spectrometry facility at its molecular sciences laboratories in Bundoora.

Funds from the CRC for Biomarker Translation and an ARC LIEF grant have enabled the university’s biochemistry department to purchase four new mass specs from Bruker Daltonics and to move an Applied Biosystems’ QStar LC/MS/MS from CSIRO Parkville to La Trobe.

The new Bruker machines are an ultraflex MALDI-TOF, a micrOTOF-Q, an HCTultra ESIO-Ion Trap MS with electron transfer dissociation and an Esquire ESI-Ion Trap.

The funds have also allowed the facility to purchase some spotting robots, a database and server and four Dionex Ultimate 3000 capillary LC systems.

La Trobe’s deputy vice chancellor for research, Professor Tim Brown, said the university had researched every major supplier of proteomic instrumentation for its requirements.

“Usually you get high accuracy or high throughput,” Brown said in a statement. “The gold standard is to try to have equipment that does both. These machines approach that.”

The facility’s manager, Vince Murphy, said the instrumentation would be used both by the biochemistry and chemistry departments and for collaborative and commercial research, including the CRC.

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