Algal Phenomics Facility

Transcript

The Phenomics Facility is a unique set of instruments that we've put together over a number of years in a way that has not been done before. The Phenomics Facility was designed to record and characterise a lot of properties of microalgae in an automated way. It's allowing us to access information from the natural environment or for research and development applications in ways that were not possible because of time and scale.

Traditionally, you would have a person working with one microalgae and working months or even years to characterise that particular strain. What this facility allows us to do now is take 5,000 strains and characterise all of them within seven days, and then go to the next 5,000.

Industry partners could work with us, especially when they have microalgae that they grow for producing biomass or biomolecules. We can actually take that microorganism that they already have and improve it. We can use directed evolution in a high-throughput way and actually find and improve that microalgae to grow in better environments to produce more of the molecule. And the best part is, we can do it really quickly. We can do the work that would take years within weeks, simply because of the number of samples we can process in a short amount of time.