Grants and Contributions:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year (2017-2018 to 2018-2019).

In the proposed project, to improve the current in situ bacteria isolation systems used by Nautilus, a novelx000D
device will be fabricated and tested to enable single-step growth and isolation of new bacteria that have, thusx000D
far, resisted attempts to domesticate. Nautilus Biosciences Canada Inc. is a marine biotechnology companyx000D
focused on the discovery and development of marine-derived natural products with applications in human andx000D
animal health and wellness. Nautilus isolates and cultures bacteria from diverse geographic locations rangingx000D
from the tropics to Canada's Arctic. One of the main challenges to this type of compound discovery is thex000D
limited ability of culturing cells, usually bacteria, in vitro. In fact, "The Great Plate Count Anomaly" suggestsx000D
that only about 1% of bacteria are cultivable in laboratories. The remaining 99% are considered 'uncultivable',x000D
or have slow growth, due to the lack of chemical and physical factors present in the bacteria's naturalx000D
environments. Therefore, there is an increasing need for development of high throughput in situ technologiesx000D
for cultivation of uncultivable species. The proposed microencapsulation chambers would address this need,x000D
and allow for greater culturing efficiency and a broader screening capability for therapeutics. To address thex000D
limitations of the current iChip designs, we propose a new design of a growth chamber and ax000D
microfluidic-based method of encapsulating bacteria in agarose micro-beads. Thus, the research proposedx000D
could lead to the isolation of new bacteria which produce new, bioactive natural products.