The genetic diversity of the dingo, Australia's largest indigenous carnivore, has been a long-standing research interest of Dr. Alan Wilton.
Research Centres and Initiatives
BABS is home to a number of significant research centres that are leaders in their respective fields and provide cutting-edge services to BABS, UNSW and other Australian and international researchers.
Ramaciotti Centre for Gene Function Analysis
The Ramaciotti Centre is a not-for-profit core facility that provides state-of-the-art facilities and expertise in the use of microarrays, sequencing and high-throughput technologies. The component of the centre housed within BABS is the core facility of a consortium distributed between five universities and five medical research centres in the Sydney-Newcastle region.
Centre for Marine Bio-Innovation
The Centre for Marine Bio-Innovation (CMB) is an international focal point for interdisciplinary basic and applied research into chemically mediated interactions between organisms. It drives research excellence in a number of platforms, including microbial biofilms and bacterial signalling, marine chemical ecology and prokaryote-eukaryote interactions, environmental and microbial genomics, colonisation biology of marine sessile organisms, novel antifouling technologies, bioremediation, inter-kingdom signalling and the bridge between environmental microbiology and engineering. These research platforms are based on understanding, in a mechanistic fashion, how chemical signals mediate the ecology, physiology and molecular biology of organisms, and the subsequent application of this knowledge to novel biotechnologies across environmental, industrial and medical settings.
Australian Centre for Astrobiology
The Australian Centre for Astrobiology (ACA) is an Associate Member of the NASA Astrobiology Institute and also has close links with the European Space Agency and other international space agencies and institutions. It is one of the few organisations in the world that is truly inter- and multi-disciplinary in a way that is reflective of astrobiology, as well as being the only centre of astrobiological research in Australia. Its key goals include placing an Australian life-seeking instrument on the surface of Mars and contributing to the understanding of the orgin of life on Earth. The ACA has a strong media, education and outreach program related to its research, which has attracted Australian Federal funding.
New South Wales Systems Biology Initiative
The Systems Biology Initiative is a new not-for-profit facility that aims to become Australia’s foremost centre for systems biology, undertaking basic and applied research in the development and application of bioinformatics for genomics and proteomics. The group will develop systems-level views of the molecular biology of the cell and is funded to engage in collaborative projects with other groups in these areas.