There were two pieces of cutting-edge tech acquired:
- Quantaurus-Tau Fluorescence lifetime spectrometer
- Quantaurus-QY Abolute PL quantum yield spectrometer
Created by Hamamatsu Corporation, the tech will help Professor Hong and her team on their quest to develop glowing chemical tags to enable very early diagnosis of cancer and neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s Disease and Huntington’s Disease.
The equipment quickly and efficiently tests different chemical tags by energizing the molecule to make it glow and very precisely measuring its brightness and how long it glows for. This offers the research team data which quantify exactly how well the tags are working – information they can then use to further refine the tag’s design.
These two pieces of tech are the only ones of their kind in Australia, and we hope that they will not only help Professor Hong but also chemists from across the country who need to test how substances fluoresce.
Thank you to The Ian Potter Foundation – it’s fantastic to have your support in accessing this high-grade equipment to further this critical research.
--
Professor Yuning Hong is the Biosensors Research Program co-lead at LIMS and a Professor in Chemistry at La Trobe University’s School of Agriculture, Biomedicine and Environment.
She holds an ARC Future Fellowship (2022 – 2026), and her research focuses on the development of novel chemical probes to explore protein unfolding, misfolding, and aggregation, oxidative stress, and autophagy, and their interplay in neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's.
