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

Even though Concordia houses various state-of-the-art research facilities, a number of crucial studies in the areas bio-electro-mechanical interactions and mechanobiological studies of cells are currently limited due to the dire need for a highly specialized high-resolution electro-mechanical probe system. Such an equipment would enhance ongoing research on developing of more reliable models and design methods by reducing the degree of uncertainty related to bio-mechanical interactions and sensing methods. The FT-EM2100 MEMS Probe station from Femtotools offers this leading-edge capacity. No similar equipment is available at Concordia or known partner institutions. Acquiring this equipment would not only advance effective collaboration between engineers, biologists and physicists but would also sustain leading-edge research success, strengthen training goals, enhance quality of dissertations, and shorten graduation time. We believe the understanding of the influence of material and electrical properties is fundamentally critical to the realization of micro or micro-nano integrated devices for biological, cellular and chemical studies. This essential research is complementary to both our engineers and physicists working in the area of microsystems, microfluidics, application of micro-nano integrated systems for bio and chemical applications, as well as for our biologists working in characterizing cellular and molecular interactions. Current research involving the imaging of cells and tissues and monitoring of metabolic activities is being done at Concordia to develop microsystems for bio applications including diagnosis of growth hormones in milk and cancer cells. However, the incapability of looking closely at the biomechanical cellular interactions is a major setback. The requested equipment surmounts this obstacle by permitting observation of thin sections of biological samples greatly advancing such critical ongoing cellular studies such as that on the human fungal pathogen Candida albicans and liver cancer cells, for example. Housed in the optical-bio microsystems lab, the system will be open to on-site and other inter-institutional collaborations across Canada including McGill, UdeM, ETS and École Polytechnique.