Grant: Research Tools and Instruments

Background. High-throughput efficiency methods to study environmental microbes are essential to understand the diversity, abundance and ecology of species of interest. For example, it is necessary to monitor the composition of algal and bacterial communities in areas affected by climate change, or with recurrent proliferation of toxic cyanobacteria (e.g., coastal regions, lakes, and rivers in Atlantic Canada), to identify the environmental factors affecting the presence and abundance of microbial species associated to fundamental ecological processes such as primary production (photosynthetic activity), nutrient recycling and responsible for the production of toxic compounds that impact human activities. Our urgent need of a modern cell sorter. My research group at the University of New Brunswick (UNB) studies environmental microbes of interest using a combination of flow cytometry (FC) and fluorescence-activated cell sorting, which give us the capacity to 1) scrutinize hundreds of microbial cells in a short time (i.e., second to minutes) and 2) isolate cells with characteristics of interest (e.g., size, photosynthetic properties). The sensitivity and speed of FC and FACS are commercially available in cell sorters (CS), which surpass radically the efficiency of microbiology studies based solely on light microscopy and visual identification. In the last eleven years, my research group has had the benefit of using a CS, but that instrument has reached the end of its useful life due to practical obsolescence (low sorting speed) and, importantly, the increasing maintenance-repair cost, given that the model we own has been discontinued and service contracts will be suspended next year. Those two factors have forced us to use private flow cytometry facilities to guarantee access to state-of-the-art CS and to continue and maintain the high quality of our research contributions. Hiring CS services is a short-term desperate solution to increase the reach and impact of our research aims, but it is impractical in the long term given that the increased cost per experiment limits severely the number of studies we can do. We have an urgent need for a high-performance CS to reduce the cost of our research and to recover our experimental flexibility. The requested CS reunites the analytical capabilities and sorting efficiency that guarantee the continuation of our current and future research aims. Relaying on a third-party cytometric facility is delaying our research objectives and thesis projects (5 HQP) supported by NSERC. Additionally, the new CS will benefit the training of 20 HQP from four different UNB research groups. The Department of Biology and UNB Vice President Research are committed to supporting microbial research in our institution, and are contributing $70,000 in cash to this application. Also, I have secured a $63,340 in-kind contribution from the vendor. The sum of both contributions represents >51% of the estimated total cost.