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

The objective of the present RTI proposal is to request funds for the acquisition of a complete imaging workstation for chemiluminescent and fluorescent analysis of gels and blots. This equipment would be located at York University, School of Kinesiology, would be shared by at least the four co-applicants' laboratories and would be then highly utilized on a daily basis. This imaging workstation would strongly support several on-going fundamental research projects in different areas of physiology, including projects currently supported by NSERC Discovery grants. It would also considerably contribute to the training of highly qualified personals including undergraduate, graduate and NSERC summer students as well as postdoctoral fellows, technicians, research assistants and associates. This imaging workstation offers within one single apparatus the possibility of running several applications routinely used in our laboratories: nucleic acids detection on gels, luciferase measurement, array screening, and proteins detection. Among them, the detection and quantification of proteins by western blotting is a heavily used technique in all our laboratories, required in many of our research projects. Such equipment provides a much better resolution and sensitivity detection than our current film-based approach. Furthermore, it also allows fluorescent multiplex protein quantification, a very powerful and reliable technique that becomes more and more indispensable for the excellence of research we aim to reach.