Facilities

The TrEnD laboratories and offices are located at Curtin University’s main campus in Perth, Western Australia. All operation spaces are classified as an ‘Approved Arrangement’ facility under Class 5.1.1 Biosecurity containment level 1 (BC1) Microbiological facility. Our Import Permits allow the facility to conduct analysis on international genetic material, soil and water.

Advanced Clean Environment (ACE) laboratory

A 434 m², pressurised, class 100 (ISO 5) clean air space housing five class 10 (ISO 4) ultra-trace laboratory modules. The facility contains specifically designed workspaces and cutting edge technology to eliminate contamination and increase precision and accuracy in pre-PCR set-up. This facility is a major contributor to why the Curtin team can provide confident data detection at levels which are filtered out in other testing facilities.

The laboratories

TrEnD has fully duplicated laboratory setups enabling research activities and restricted quality controlled service activities to occur.

The TrEnD academic lab and its sister service lab eDNA Frontiers each have:

• Sample preparation laboratory – an isolated and dedicated space for filtering environmental water samples, pulverising sediment/coral sediment or scats for DNA extraction, and scraping of deposition arrays. This laboratory contains dual robotic DNA extraction systems, and extensive cold storage capacity for valuable samples.
• Sequencing and analysis laboratories – quantitative PCR systems, DNA fragment analysis, DNA size selection instrumentation, massive parallel sequencing technology.

Pawsey Supercomputing Centre

Access to one of two, Tier-1, High Performance Computing facilities in Australia, with expertise in supercomputing, data, cloud services and visualisation. The Pawsey Centre is used to complete the highly computationally intensive quality filtering and matching analysis of sequencing datafiles to taxonomic reference databases to produce presence/absence results and phylogenetic tree displays.