From the Director, Welcome to the Western Australian Centre of Excellence for Plant Metabolomics.

The Centre has been established to carry out fundamental research in plant metabolic biology. An understanding of plant energy metabolism provides us with knowledge of how plants grow and how they allocate their resources to different products, organs and life processes. The goal is to develop strategies to select or tailor plants for improved performance under environmental extremes and for improved production of food, materials or bioenergy.

smith Professor Steve Smith
Australian Research Council Federation Fellow
Director, WA Centre of Excellence for Plant Metabolomics
Chief Investigator, ARC Centre of Excellence in Plant Energy Biology


What is metabolomics?

Metabolomics is the study of potentially all the metabolites in a biological system such as a cell or tissue. It requires high resolution separation techniques linked to analysers such as mass spectrometers.  When combined with other functional genomics analyses including transcriptomics and proteomics, metabolomics offers potential to understand the whole biological system from genome to phenome. Metabolomics offers the opportunity to discover new gene functions, to understand the metabolic basis of physiology and disease, and to aid in biotechnology, diagnosis and breeding.


logos The Government of Western Australia The University of Western Australia Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Plant Energy Biology