Grants and Contributions

Support aboriginal communities in becoming successful participants in commercial fisheries and aquaculture

Support aboriginal communities in becoming successful participants in commercial fisheries and aquaculture

The Habitat StewardshipProgram (HSP) contributes to the recovery of endangered, threatened, and other species of concern, by engaging Canadians in conservation actions to benefit wildlife to protect aquaticspecies at risk.

To carry out the Government of Canada’s 2018 Nature Legacy for Canada, which includes supporting and leveraging efforts to protect and recover aquatic species at risk; and building Indigenous capacity.

Support aboriginal communities in becoming successful participants in commercial fisheries and aquaculture

Support aboriginal communities in becoming successful participants in commercial fisheries and aquaculture

The progress in silicon photonics research has seen the advent of photonic sensors as a promising technology for its low-cost, small size and robustness. Photonic integrated circuits offer compact and all-in-one optical assembly on a chip the size of a few hundred micrometers and make it an ideal target for portable solutions for use in the field. Conventional light-to-chip coupling is achieved through the use of optical fibers precisely aligned to surface grating couplers on-chip. For a portable, self-contained unit, the delicate hardware must be secured with adhesives and solders that cause mechanical stresses in the chip, leading to false sensor readings and degradation with exposure to the harsh environment of the field. Furthermore, it is often required to place sensors in difficult to reach places. This project, will design and characterize novel nanophotonic structures on a silicon chip capable of receiving and transmitting a collimated beam of light for remote, free-space sensing. This will allow placing the sensor device in otherwise difficult to reach locations and remotely interrogate the chip by illuminating its surface with a beam of light.

Designs for devices that use the atomic silicon quantum dot technique will be determined. This design will attempt to tailor the SET array to optimize the size and arrangement of the SETs and the associated connections so that the capacitance and consequently the charge energy, Ec, make its operation as a CBT at high temperatures possible. The method to interface the SET to the macro-world to enable the measurement of the temperature-dependant electrical conductance change will be developed.

A key component of the immune system of higher organisms are antibodies. Antibodies function to bind and eliminate infections. In addition to their natural immune system function, antibodies have emerged as a powerful type of drug to treat a variety of disease from cancer to the Ebola virus. While in the majority of vertebrates, antibodies consist of two protein chains (a heavy and light chain), there are three cases where antibodies have evolved to consist only of a heavy chain. These heavy-chain only antibodies are found in the camel family, two evolutionary branches of cartilaginous fishes. While the antibodies from camel and the elasmobranch (sharks) have been well characterized, to date, there has been no investigation into the heavy chain antibodies found in the holocephalin branch of cartilaginous fish. The goal of this project is to examine the atomic structure of holocephalin heavy-chain antibodies alone and in complex with the proteins which they bind. The structures will then be compared to camel and other mammal antibodies to determine if there are unique ways in which the holocephalin antibodies bind their targets.

Delivery of drugs to the central nervous system is hampered by the blood-brain barrier (BBB), a complex structure composed of multiple cells types and tissues that is subjected to forces due to blood flow. Current brain drug development relies on cells in dishes or animal models of the BBB that do not fully mimic human physiology and therefore cannot effectively predict whether a therapeutic will cross the BBB in a patient. Improved BBB models are necessary to overcome these challenges. To this end, the project will develop novel microfluidic chips into which laboratory BBB models can 3D bioprinted, grown, and used to test drug compounds in an environment that mimics key aspects of the human BBB. These platforms are expected to improve the drug development pipeline by reducing animal usage and drug development costs while improving the identification of promising drug candidates.