Honeybees are considered the world’s most devoted pollinators as they provide an essential ecosystem service that is vital to the maintenance of both wild plant communities and agricultural productivity. In Canada alone, the honeybee industry is worth over 4 billion dollars annually. Over the last years, beekeepers have been faced with major colony loss due […]

This proposed project is to develop efficient sensing materials and devices that can detect trace amounts of reactive oxygen species (ROS), in particular a type of activated oxygen, namely singlet oxygen. Detection of singlet oxygen is an important but very challenging task in biological and pharmaceutical applications. The main difficulty in detecting singlet oxygen is […]

Obesity is a well-known risk factor in many diseases, including diabetes, cancer, and heart disease, in part due to abnormal blood vessel development with fat tissue. During weight gain, the volume of fat tissues can undergo drastic changes. Normally, when new tissues develop, there is a corresponding increase in blood vessel density via a process […]

Conventional molecular discovery relies on high-throughput screening strategies (HTS) to identify molecules that match a specific set of user-defined properties. Unfortunately, due to the enormous size of chemical spaces (10^60 molecules in the case of the drug-like chemical space), HTS is usually performed over pre-built chemical libraries of moderate size, often by employing computational/AI methods […]

Diabetes mellitus (DM) is a metabolic disease, which is characterized by insufficient or inefficient insulin secretory response and elevated blood glucose level (Prabhakar and Doble, 2008). In 2021, 536.6 million people worldwide suffered from diabetes and this number is projected to grow to 783.2 million by 2045 (Sun et al., 2022). Sorbus decora (SD), commonly […]

The innovation of plant cell and tissue culture (TC) techniques has supported plant propagation programs and allowed for the development of new ornamental varieties. Van Belle Nursery is interested in adapting TC as a method of cultivation but lack the technical expertise and understanding of infrastructure requirements to establish an on-site TC program. Specifically, they […]

Stem cells and other pluripotent cells are under active investigation for the development of new therapeutic treatments to regenerate and repair diseased and damaged tissues. Published studies indicate that some mesenchymal cells derived from adult human hair follicles exhibit stem cell properties and can form different cells types if they are given specific biological signals […]

Glycoconjugate vaccines have shown efficiency to control infectious diseases and hold great promises in cancer immunotherapy. Nonetheless, there is an important need to identify novel immunostimulating carriers for carbohydrate antigens as well as to optimize the currently used protein carriers. This Mitacs project aims at developing versatile biochemical approaches and technology for the design and […]

Cellulose is the most common natural polymer available. The project aims to produce esters from cellulose fibers employing green solvents, such as ionic liquids. Ionic liquids’ properties are tunable by changing the anion and the cation to dissolve simultaneously the cellulose and the esterification agent. The esterification agent is a free fatty acid which can […]

This project will measure the behavioural responses in a certain fly species, ‘Ormia ochracea’, to a variety of cricket mating songs, and from geographically separated North American populations of the fly. This type of fly attacks crickets so that their larvae may feed and mature within the cricket’s body. They locate the cricket’s position by […]

Biological-system-based production of chemicals and fuels (Eg: ethanol, bio-diesel, bio-nylon, etc.) has lesser or no impact on the environment than their conventional, chemical processes But, these biofactories are not evolved to produce industrially important chemicals yet. Hence, the productivity of the desired chemical is low in an isolated biological system. Metabolic engineering modifies the metabolic […]

Diagnostic tests that currently direct patient therapy in cancer and other diseases are more typically performed at the genetic level, despite the fact that the beneficial response to drugs and the development of resistance are rooted in the proteins that comprise the cell’s signaling pathways. We argue that this is a major gap, as proteomics […]