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

Bacteria, yeasts, and other microbes have a long history of providing beneficial services and products to mankind. This includes fermentation (beer, wine), food production (bread, cheese), and production of lifesaving drugs (penicillin). This process of domesticating microbes for specific applications continues to this day, but now occurs at a molecular level. Today, the genes within the microbe are specifically altered to program the organism to perform a specific task. This may be done to learn more about the functions of genes in the organism, or to program the microorganism to produce useful molecules for study, such as proteins or drugs. This equipment proposal centres around six shaker-incubators, which will be used by graduate students from four different labs at Queen's University to cultivate microbes under controlled conditions. This will allow the graduate students to study bacteria that produce drug-like molecules as well as to produce proteins in bacteria in order to understand their function in disease and cell processes. For example, graduate students will use the shakers to access new antibiotics from soil and marine bacteria in order to address the rise of antibiotic resistance to our current drugs. Students will also produce proteins from pathogenic bacteria in order to understand how these proteins contribute to diseases caused by these bacteria. Finally, the shakers will be used to produce unique enzymes discovered through genome sequencing in order to understand their mechanisms. This will enable the development of these enzymes as environmentally friendly industrial catalysts and as agents for degrading pollutants found in soil and water bodies.