Over the past three years we have built state-of-the-art contained facilities for investigating clinical and experimental samples, in the context of microbiota, rapid pathogen detection, analysing host response as well antibiotic resistance markers.
For clinical analysis, we take any sample (swab, bronchoalveolar lavage, blood, stool etc) and convert it to nucleic acids. We then interrogate that sample in great depth using, for example, multiplex quantitative PCR in combination with metabolomic, proteomic and transcriptomic sequencing.
In addition, we have set up a high-throughput bacterial phenotyping facility using high-content imaging with automated image analysis to investigate antimicrobial resistance at single cell resolution.
Our facilities includes a number of specialised pieces of equipment some of which are shown below.