Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

This grant will be used to purchase two pieces of equipment: (1) a rotary evaporator, and (2) a High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) instrument. These instruments will be critical components of a research program focusing on plant pathogenic Streptomyces bacteria that cause potato common scab, which is an economically-important plant disease in Canada. Potato scab is characterized by raised corky-like lesions that form on the surface of potato tubers. These lesions affect the marketability of the potato crop leading to significant economic losses for potato growers. The equipment funded by this grant will be used to identify, quantify and purify natural products that are produced by the best characterized scab-causing pathogen, Streptomyces scabies, and which contribute to the pathogenic character of this organism. The goal of this research is to better understand how these natural products are produced by S. scabies, how they function in disease development, and the environmental conditions that promote the synthesis of the molecules. The results of this research will shed further light on the importance of S. scabies natural products in scab disease development, which has applications for the development of more effective scab management strategies. Another research program that will benefit from the use of this equipment is one that focuses on microbial antibiotic production and new drug discovery. This research program aims to better understand how antibiotics are produced by soil microorganisms so that strategies can be designed to enhance their production for commercial purposes. Furthermore, it aims to characterize new microbial natural products that may be useful as drugs for the treatment of human diseases. The equipment requested will also be important for two additional research programs, one of which studies the involvement of small signaling molecules in virus-mediated genetic exchange in bacteria, and the other which characterizes plant responses to stress. Thus, the instruments funded by this grant will support research programs that have applications to agriculture, biotechnology and medicine, and which also contribute to the advancement of scientific knowledge.