The UTS Algal Phenomics Facility is a world-class facility to provide research integrated capability focusing on phenomics solutions to the biotech, agriculture and environmental sectors.

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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.

The UTS Algal Phenomics Facility (APF) is Australia’s and the world-first phenomics facility designed for high throughput screening of algal strains, mutants and transformants in a dynamic environment. 

Woman pipetting liquids

Advanced algae services

Accelerate product development and improve performance with advanced algal phenomics capabilities with the UTS Climate Change Cluster, combining a world-class algal biobank with cutting-edge phenomics to accelerate your R&D, product development, and scale-up needs.

Find out more

What do we offer?

We offer Industry and Research focused applications.

Industry focused applications

  • Optimization of growth conditions for maximum biomass production.
  • Optimization of growth conditions for production of a specific compound.
  • Evaluation of breeding, assisted evolution or hybridization to yield elite traits.

Research focused applications

  • Changes in phenome in response to different environmental conditions
  • Ramanome analysis
  • Metabolome analysis
  • Fluorome analysis
  • Trait characterisation of a mutant strain

Capabilities 

Automation integrated instruments

  • Robotic system (PSI/Omron)
  • Algal growth chamber (PSI)
  • Liquid handling robot (Opentrons)
  • Custom designed FluorCAM fluorometer (PSI)
  • Cell culture plate centrifuge (Agilent)
  • Hyperspec optical analysis unit (PSI)
  • Flow Cytometer (Beckman Cytoflex LX)

Stand-alone instruments

  • DNA/RNA extraction robot (Qiagen QIAcube HT)
  • QTof/Tof LCMS (Waters Xevo G2-XS)
  • Open (and Closed) FluorCAM fluorometer (PSI)
  • DXR™3 SmartRaman Spectrometer (Thermo Fisher Scientific)
  • Cell culture plate reader (Tecan Spark)
  • 3L photobioreactor with turbidostat, CO2 control; with florometer, optical density, pH, temperature and CO2 sensors (PSI)
  • Multispectral multicultivator MC MIX (PSI)
  • Stackable incubators with CO2 control (Eppendorf Innova® S44i)
Phenomics Equipment

Our system is located in a PC2 workspace and is designed to work with microalgae and macroalgae.

Peter Ralph and Chris Hall with algae bioreactor

CSIRO & UTS: Accelerating the australian algae sector, together

Australian National Algae Culture Collection (ANACC) CSIRO and the Climate Change Cluster (C3) UTS bring together world-class science, innovation, and infrastructure to support a thriving Australian algae industry. By combining our expertise, we offer integrated services that de-risk development, accelerate innovation, and enable rapid optimisation from lab to industrial scale. With access to unique national resources and a wide selection of locally sourced strains, we help industry partners scale faster, reduce uncertainty, and unlock new commercial opportunities.

Learn more and view the types of datasets that can be produced via our Algae Phenomics Facility "PhenoSelect" robotic array here: 

Algae Phenomics & CSIRO - PhenoSelect Sample Datasets

Contact Us

For bookings or more information

Email us
phenomics.c3@uts.edu.au

Phenomics Facility
Level 6, Building 4
67 Thomas St
Broadway, NSW 2007
University of Technology
Australia
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