Singapore: The University of Western Australia has teamed up with Agilent Technologies, one of the world's leaders in measurement technology, committing to a five-year collaboration that will enable the development of ground-breaking applications in life sciences.

The partnership with Agilent Technologies will contribute to UWA's local, national and international research and teaching alliances through the Centre of Metabolomics, The ARC Centre if Excellence in Plant Energy Biology and the UWA Comparative Analysis of Biomolecular Networks Research and Training Centre.

The UWA centers have agreed to put Agilent platform technologies and applications to the test in an effort to advance international training opportunities while furthering research into some of society's big challenges in health, food production and the environment.

Through its Agilent Global Academia Program, Agilent has already donated a high-resolution mass spectrometer, used to provide accurate metabolomic analysis of molecules in complex samples, as well as cash grants as part of the five-year collaboration with UWA.

Researchers are excited at the opportunity of a big increase in capability in areas of research including drug discovery and metabolism, innovative pathway mapping in diseases such as cancer and diabetes, environmental pollution characterisation, food analysis and disease biomarker discovery.