Grants and Contributions

The objectives of the Program are: • promoting volunteerism among seniors; • engaging seniors in the community through mentoring of others; • expanding awareness of elder abuse, including financial abuse; • supporting social participation and inclusion of seniors; and • providing capital assistance for new and existing community projects and/or programs for seniors.

The project explores a novel concept of fabricating cost-effective gas turbine high-temperature coatings for sustainable aviation. The hybrid manufacturing process involves physical vapor deposition and thermal diffusion. If proven successful, it has the potential to scale-up for industrial applications.

This project will attempt to identify variation in Botrytis cinerea resistance and susceptibility within available cannabis germplasm. Transcriptomics coupled with laser dissection microscopy will be used to explore the interactions between the plant and pathogen. Sources of pathogen resistance in cannabis will be investigated.

Composting technology is one of the environmental strategies of choice for the management of solid organic waste in cities: C40 City Zero Waste. When discarded, food, with its eco-packaging and new “green” electronic labels, is a particularly critical problem. Questions: are they compostable and can they all be thrown in our “brown bins”? An O2-CO2 respirometer will be used to answer these “fundamental” questions from a microbiological point of view and their eco-design.

Conventional surgeries to correct scoliosis, an abnormal curvature of the spine, require multiple X-rays to guide the modification of the curvature, exposing patients and OR personnel to ionizing radiation. This project aims to eliminate the need for these x-rays by developing a fast, non-invasive imaging method to guide spinal curvature modifications.

Working in harsh engine environments, these coatings will degrade in performance with time and therefore it is critical to understand the mechanisms of the degradation in order to develop more durable coatings for oxidation protection of gas turbine hot section components. As a research collaborator in the NRC New Beginning Initiative project on “A Novel Manufacturing Process for Gas Turbine High-Temperature Coatings”, Prof.

L-arginine possesses numerous health benefits in humans, and it is an essential amino acid in cats and dogs and required at a high level in pet food. This amino acid has also been used in food as a flavoring agent and pharmaceutical industries for medical/clinical applications and health benefits. L-arginine can be produced by bacterial fermentation through various bioengineering technologies and also chemical synthesis. In pet industry, a synthetic source of L-arginine has been used for many years; however, the synthetic L-arginine is costly and has a bad taste. Microalgae is an underexploited crop for production of nutrients and bioactive compounds. NRC has established a microalgae library and identified strains have identified a few species/strains containing high contents of L-arginine. The goal of this project is to produce L-arginine in microalgae by testing the scalability of the selected strains and to prepare for a metabolic engineering approach by collecting genome-wide gene expression information during the arginine-producing growth conditions.

Legal production and sale of Cannabis is a relatively new, but valuable, industry in Canada. This sector is still maturing and has not
benefitted from a long history of research into plant-pathogen interactions. The presence of pathogens as well as the potential
presence of pesticides are important health concerns for a product destined for human consumption. By sequencing gene expression
products produced by both the plant and pathogen early in the infection process we will catalogue processes implicated in the infection
process.

The Todd lab will be working directly with the NRC in establishing and standardizing protocols for Botrytis cineria infection of Cannabis
sativa. Once established, the two groups will work together establish conditions and time points to sample for RNA extraction,
sequencing, and data analysis. Identifying some of the basic early molecular interactions between Cannabis and Botrytis will set the
stage for further research with a long-term goal of understanding this process to identify targets for Cannabis crop improvement

Consumer electronics has broadened access to education and information and contributed to improve our quality
of life. Unfortunately, the pervasive expansion of electronics is generating an unsustainable growth of waste
electrical and electronic equipment that contains toxic substances imposing great pressure on the environment and
causing major health concerns. To alleviate the environmental footprint of electronics and to extend their capabilities
in emerging areas focusing on low human- and eco-toxicity, in this project we will design & develop devices based
on benign organic electronic materials and we will investigate the devices for their biodegradability with expected important outcomes in the Manufacturing, Information & Telecommunication Technology, Green Technology and Biomedical sectors.

L'évaluation de la performance environnementale d'un processus de transformation de matières résiduelles biosourcées repose sur un
ensemble de critères. Ces derniers doivent inclure non seulement les aspects spécifiquement reliés au procédé (consommation de
produits et d'énergie ainsi que les émissions) mais également les indicateurs associés à la diminution des impacts par la valorisation
des matières résiduelles (évitement de rejets et substitution de ressources). Dans ce contexte, les travaux prévus s'inscrivent dans
l'évaluation comparative des essais de traitement qui seront réalisés au CNRC sur une unité pilote de laboratoire. Il s’agira dans un
premier temps, de formaliser un modèle cohérent des processus unitaires et des flux matières/énergie mis en jeu par le système de
traitement facilitant la structuration des données associées aux différents essais. Dans un deuxième temps, il s’agira d’analyser les
relations entre les paramètres d’opération de l’unité pilote et les caractéristiques des produits et rejets générés lors des essais dans
une optique d’aide à la décision.