Our facilities
We believe in high-quality research and as a researcher at the AUT Centre for Future Foods you have access to state-of-the-art facilities to delve deeper into unravelling the secrets of future foods.
The suite has a wide range of analytical equipment including AA, ICP, HPLC, GC-MS, LC-MS, FTIR and NMR, allowing compositional analysis of food products, for example amino acid, sugar, mineral, phenolic and other flavour compounds.
The chemistry preparation suite has a complete set of instruments for proximate analysis of food (for example Soxhlet lipid extractor, automated Kjeldahl analyser, vacuum oven), and the extraction of food components for further GC- or LC-MS analysis (for example homogenisers, centrifuges, ultrasonicate units).
The suite is equipped with a rotary evaporator, centrifugal evaporator, spray-drier, freeze drier for sample concentration and drying. Other tools such as a UV spectrophotometry unit are also available.
In addition, the proteomics suite is equipped with essential tools (centrifuge, vortex, homogeniser, incubator, incubating shaker, thermal shaker, sonicator, hot plate, pH meter, analytical balance) for peptide and protein extraction, and preparation for MS-based analysis. The suite allows SDS-PAGE, in-gel digestion and in-solution digestion of proteins.
The general food science suite has all the necessary kitchen appliances for students and researchers to process their food and carry out product development activities.
Specialised equipment housed in the general food science suite includes:
- Beer brewing units (30 litre capacity)
- Freeze-drier
- Roller mill for crushing grains
- Friction cooker for making extruded snacks
- Semi-auto canning machine
- Sausage stuffer
- Rheometer
- Texture analyser
- Sieve shaker
- Hammer mill
- Colourimeter
- Distillation units
- Activated carbon filters for liquid samples
This suite includes sensory testing booths for descriptive sensory analysis, projective mapping and consumer testing.
There are computers in each booth for sensory data collection using the Fizz software.
The microbiology suite includes specialised equipment for biofilm research (CDC bioreactors, flow cells, fluorescent microscope). This equipment supports our research into anti-biofilm and cleaning regime strategies.
Equipment for molecular-based work (DNA extraction equipment, bead beaters, PCR machines, agarose gel dock equipment, QuBit and Nanodrop) is also available.
We also have DNA sequencing capability (Illumina MiSEQ, Oxford Nanopore, Oxford P2 Solo, computer and server access for assembly and genome analysis). This supports our research for antibiotic resistance, extremophile and air sampling research.
The suite also has essential microbiology equipment (autoclave, incubators, shaking incubator, centrifuges Class 2 biosafety cabinet). This equipment supports all microbiology research.
This suite has a bioinformatic workstation (24 core Intel Xeon CPU 400 GB; Linux) and a GPU workstation (nVidia workstation A6000 GPU).
Both machines are efficient in processing genome assembly, microbiome analysis, transcriptomics, and outputs from Nanopore Oxford P2 Solo DNA sequencer.