Grant: Engage Grants Program

Yannick Huot of U. Sherbrooke and Douglas Campbell of Mount Allison have deep, complementary expertiseapplying measures of chlorophyll fluorescence to track aquatic productivity and responses of phytoplankton toenvironmental change, using PSI chlorophyll kinetic fluorometers, supplied in Canada through Qubit.The PSI/Qubit modular instrument system is modular and extensible, economical and has flexibleprogramming capacities and low-level control of the instrument to create custom protocols, to replace multipleother instruments.We seek Engage funding to work with QuBIT and PSI on:i) Developing a more streamlined control scripting and data output format.ii) Developing simpler downstream dataprocessing, implemented through simpler, open source R scripts.i) and ii) would help open the instrument to more routine users, beyond specialists.iii) Developing a dual-channel instrument control for simultaneous measurement of two samples, using twodetector units applying the same measurement protocol. This is a particular need for high throughput, kineticstudies of photophysiology, comparing control/treatment samples in parallel.These software efforts would broaden the potential market of the QuBIT/PSI hardware.