About us
The Australian Proteome Analysis Facility (APAF), located within the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Macquarie University, provides academic and corporate clients with modern functional proteomics and protein chemistry tools integrated with in-house and commercial bioinformatics toolkits. The facility has a mixed portfolio of activity including contract analysis, collaborative applied and fundamental research, and technology development to industry, government and the research community.
APAF is proud to be integrated with Macquarie University where the concept of proteome was defined and the term coined by Marc Wilkins (current advisory board member of APAF) in 1994. APAF has been a leader in developing proteomic technologies for over 20 years, with funding supported from the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) since 2007. NCRIS support, along with BioPlatform Australia (BPA), drives the main objectives of APAF to advance education of and coordinate research activities in `omics sciences including genomics, proteomics, metabolomics and bioinformatics at various nodes across Australia. APAFs current funding with BPA (NCRIS) is in renewal for the 2018/19 period.
APAF’s multidisciplinary team and instrumentation resources allow it to serve the community across diverse research disciplines and provide a range of services, including sample preparation, biochemical separations, mass spectrometry-based quantitative proteomic profiling, biomarker discovery, targeted proteomics, quantitative analysis of post-translational modifications, and protein-protein interaction analysis, all of which can be performed for a wide variety of organisms.
One of APAF’s goals is to continually push the limits of these technologies to answer the most challenging research questions. This ensures that Australian researchers in the life sciences, medical, agriculture, food and biotech sectors will continue to have access to the latest generation of advanced technologies, and thereby retain global leadership across their respective fields.