Innovative Projects Realized

Challenges and opportunities for conducting physical activity research in the Latin American context

The project “Challenges and opportunities for conducting physical activity research in the Latin American context” consists of a capacity building experience, in which an international PhD candidate in Epidemiology, member of the Healthy Active Living and Obesity research group, will spend 4 months in a research internship that will allow her to be involved in the different stages of conducting research projects in physical activity in the National Institute of Public Health in Mexico (INSP). The project will adjust to the current research projects developed at the Center for Nutrition and Health Research at the INSP and will include the participation in two important courses offered by the INSP: “Research and advocacy for policies in public health”, and “Physical Activity and Public Health”. The outcomes of the project will include protocols, reports, data collected, and one research manuscript.

Breakable mesoporous silica coated upconversion nanoparticles for the on-demand delivery of temozolomide

Controlling the location, timing and dosage of drug release is essential in increasing drug efficacy and protecting the body from side effects. Such on-demand, targeted drug delivery is especially important for diseases like cancer, because tumors vary widely patient to patient, and so, treatments should be personalized to suit the patient’s individual tumor characteristics and growth profile. As well, chemotherapy drugs are highly toxic, so we need targeted treatment to ensure they are delivered only to the tumor instead of releasing to other parts of the body.
My research investigates light as a stimulus to trigger chemotherapy release for an aggressive form of brain cancer called glioblastoma multiforme. In my system, a core nanoparticle converts safe, invisible, near-infrared light to a higher energy ultraviolet light. The nanoparticle is covered with a porous silica coating that disintegrates in response to the converted ultraviolet light. TO BE CONT’D

Speech Localization and Recognition for Humanoid Robotics

Robots and other autonomous machines currently have limited sound awareness and speech recognition capabilities, which limits their ability to interact with humans. Applying insights from cognitive neuroscience provides novel ways to improve these interactions. The primary objective of this proposal is to implement an auditory AI for robotics that finds human talkers in the environment and recognizes what they are saying. At the end of the project we anticipate a functioning speech localization and recognition system that will allow humanoid robots to understand and communicate verbally with humans. This expands on work done in a Canada-Italy Innovation award in 2017. This system will use state-of-the-art neural network approaches in machine learning, and will be tested on the iCub cognitive robotics platform.

Advanced Control Techniques for Power Electronics Interfaces in DC-Applications

Power electronics interfaces play a major role in the connection of various components in electrical power systems.
This project is focused on interfaces for energy storage systems (supercapacitors), and potentially hydrogen fuel cells.
A fast acting and flexible DC-DC converter topology is under-development at Concordia University. One problem is the lack of expertise in advanced control theory required for exploiting the full potential of this new topology. To address this issue, the plan is to have a PhD student in power electronics from Concordia University, working for three-months with Dr. Damm (Université Paris-Saclay), whom is an expert in advanced and non-linear control theory.
Among the main outcomes of this project, is the optimization of the control strategy of the power electronics interfaces to be used in net-zero DC Residential Nanogrids and Electric Vehicles. It is expected that it will enhance the power quality, reliability, operational/set-up costs and overall performance.

The morphogenetic effects of DNA damage on the filamentous bacterium Streptomyces

Binary fission, the process in which one bacterium divides into two identical cells, is the most common form of bacterial cell division. However, not all bacteria grow like this. The Streptomyces are a filamentous bacterium that undergo a lifecycle (similar to eukaryotic fungi) which culminates in sporulation. The Streptomyces are a biomedically important bacterium as they have been the source of many modern medicines, from antibiotics to immunosuppressants. The production of these molecules is linked with the Streptomyces’ ability to complete its lifecycle. It is well known that bacteria respond to DNA damage by stalling cell division. However, research groups have yet to directly address the ways in which Streptomyces responds to DNA damage. By using real-time fluorescence microscopy with fluorescently-tagged proteins, my project aims to discover how the Streptomyces regulates its cell division in response to DNA damage. TO BE CONT’D

Collective Organization and Legal Protection of Precarious and Informal Workers: Lessons from Canada and Brazil

Precarious employment is an increasingly common term used to highlight labour market insecurity (McCann and FUDGE, 2017). In Canada, precarious employment usually relates to atypical forms of work that can present all or some of those characteristics: limited or no social benefits and statutory entitlements, insecurity and low paid, high safety or/and health risks (Vosko, 2003). In developing countries, four out of five workers have no social protection and 2 billion work in in the informal sector (WBG, 2019). A more precarious labour market demands new ways to effectively protect people and to promote their capabilities (Kolben, 2016), regardless of their employment status (ILO, 2019). The objective of this proposal is to develop a comparative analysis on how Brazil and Canada guarantee acceptable working conditions to precarious workers, specifically by promoting and guaranteeing their right to organize collectively.

Spiritual Ecology: Yoga and the Environment

The proposed research would examine the role of spiritual ecology in shifting cultural attitudes and beliefs toward the environment. The research would analyze how, in principle and in practice, yoga may inspire a re-evaluation of the culture of materialism and overconsumption that is prevalent in Western society today. The research would be guided by questions such as:
1. How do individuals make a spiritual connection to nature through yoga practice?
2. Can practicing yoga help to foster compassion for the environment?
3. Can practicing yoga have an impact on an individual’s environmental consciousness and/or behaviours?

Possible research methods include a literature review, semi-structured interviews with yoga teachers and practitioners, and attending an eco-yoga retreat to observe what factors can contribute to fostering a connection to nature in the context of yoga practice. The expected outcome is a written report including an analysis of the data collected from the interviews and observations from the eco-yoga retreat.

Ancestry and health in Latin American native and admixed populations

Using genome-wide data in collaboration with the Peruvian Genome Diversity Project, our goals are:
(i)Populations from the Peruvian Central Andes are highly homogeneous. We use Approximate Bayesian Computation and patterns of identity-by-descent to infer when the intensification of the gene pool homogenization on this geographic region started, in the historical context of the Andean prehistory.
(ii)Peruvian Native Americans are settled in different environments such as hypoxic of the Andean highlands and the humidity of Amazonian tropical forest. We are identified genetic variants that are highly differentiated between these environments as product of the natural selection.
(iii)To infer the dynamics of European, African and Native American post-Columbian admixture in Peruvian populations of the Coast, Andes and Amazonia.
(iv)To infer how evolutionary factors acting on Peruvian populations have modeled the distribution of GWAS-hits of complex phenotypes and pharmacogenetics biomarkers.

Idiosyncratic processing of complex information in autism

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a highly prevalent neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by social communication deficits, restricted interests and repetitive behaviours. Accumulating evidence suggests neuroimaging to have a great potential in clarifying the neurological bases of ASD. In this project we will use magnetoencephalography (MEG) to investigate the neuromagnetic mechanisms of information processing in typical and autistic brain during movie watching. The MEG data will be collected at the primary university and analyzed at the host university. We will test the hypothesis that autistic brain processes the information in more individualistic way, thus the variability between ASD participants in brain response to the same information will be higher than in typical participants. Such idiosyncrasy of ASD brain could potentially reflect the heterogeneity of the ASD population and aid new classification development. We will also explore the link between the idiosyncrasy of brain response and ASD symptoms severity.

Transmodal sensory integration in Autism

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by social and communication impairments and by restricted and stereotyped behaviors. Sensory processing alterations seem to have an important toll in ASD individuals. In the present study, ASD and typically developing (TD) children between 8 and 12 years old will participate in a task involving visual and auditive integration while brain activity is recorded with a magnetoencephalograpy (MEG) scanner at the primary university. Participants will go through a battery of tests to associate cognition and symptomatology with the recorded MEG brain activity.
A collaborative research project will be conducted at the host university with the obtained data. Novel approaches will be applied to characterize brain activation during the different conditions of the task. TO BE CONT’D

Structure of Parkin Rcat domain bound to ubiquitin

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disease. PD is caused by genetic predispositions leading to neuronal cell death. Dysfunction of damaged mitochondrial turnover by mitophagy (mitochondrial autophagy) and the ubiquitin-proteasome system has been found in most cases of genetic PD. The ubiquitin-proteasome system mediates protein degradation trough ubiquitination – a post-translational modification involving a series of ubiquitin (Ub) transfer steps among a variety of enzymes. Interaction between Ub and an E3 ligase occurs before a final covalent transfer of Ub to substrate. Parkin is a mitochondrial E3 ligase that plays a vital role in regulating mitophagy and the ubiquitin-proteasome system. Currently, no information exists about the structure of ubiquitin-conjugated parkin. The main goal of this project is to determine the atomic level structure of Parkin bound to ubiquitin. This structure could be used to design small molecule modulators of parkin-mediated ubiquitination. A bigger view of this project has been actively involved providing a better quality of life for patients and their families.

Characterization of TRAPPC10 variants in patient-derived fibroblasts and in a knockout model

The TRAPP complex is a large protein complex involved in a number of different cellular processes including membrane traffic. Individuals with mutations in the genes encoding the proteins of this complex have been increasingly identified using whole exome and whole genome sequencing methods. To date, only a single individual with a candidate (and not yet confirmed as causative) mutation in the gene encoding the TRAPPC10 component of this complex has been reported as part of a much larger cohort. The Crosby/Baple group in the UK have identified an extended multinuclear family with several individuals with neurodevelopmental delay, in which a mutation in the TRAPPC10 gene cosegregates. Together with the previous report of the candidate TRAPPC10 gene mutation, this provides strong genetic evidence to define TRAPPC10 gene mutation as a cause of this condition. TO BE CONT’D