Category: What’s He Building in There?

The problem
WORLDWIDE SHIFTS IN land use and global climate change are transforming the environment at a concerning pace. Only recently have scientists become aware of just how significant the impact of our actions has been. Average global temperatures have risen sharply over the past few decades, in addition to the loss of natural habitats by conversion into agriculturally cultivated land.
Intuitively, it is clear that such intense environmental changes will have repercussions that increase extinction rates, but the world’s ecosystems are complicated, and predicting how species diversity responds to climate change is no easy matter. Improving conservation and recovering endangered species requires accurate predictions of future shifts in biodiversity.

The researcher
Jeremy Kerr’s lab, the Canadian Facility for Ecoinformatics Research, is located in the Biosciences complex on campus. There he researches changes in biodiversity across entire continents rather than in any one, local ecosystem. This means that he deals with enormous amounts of information, requiring him to be on the forefront of ecoinformatics, the science of information in ecology.

The project
In order to test whether he can accurately predict future changes in biodiversity over larger areas, Kerr pretended to go back in time. He used a macroecological computer model to predict gradients in butterfly diversity over the entire 20th century. By comparing the predicted richness in butterfly species to actual historical records of 139 species, Kerr was able to judge the predictive power of his model.

The key
Starting from the year 1900 and inputting historical data sets on climate, elevation, land cover, and human population density, Kerr was able to accurately simulate how butterfly diversity changed across Canada throughout the 20th century. In northerly areas, butterfly diversity increased while at lower latitudes it decreased. This observation suggests that macroecological theory can indeed forecast where species will be found well into the future.
The ability to predict how species diversity will respond to climate change could improve conservation planning in the 21st century.

What’s he building in there?

The problem
WHEN YOU THINK of pollution, what jumps to mind? Heavy metals, BP oil spill, carbon tax? What about the words antibiotics, the pill, nicotine, or Prozac? These so-called pharmaceutical pollutants are seeping out of our medicine cabinets and into our rivers and lakes.
Drugs are only partially metabolized in your body; the rest of them are flushed down the toilet. To make matters worse, traditional sewage treatment plants fail to cleanse the water of these chemicals, allowing them to flow right into rivers and lakes.
Last year Canadians filled 483 million prescriptions (that’s 14 prescriptions per person and doesn’t count the large amounts of antibiotics given to livestock).
So what happens when all the fish in the pond are on Prozac?

The researcher
Vance Trudeau is a neuroendocrinologist at the U of O and the Centre for Advanced Research in Environmental Genomics. He studies how hormones control brain function and how, in turn, the brain regulates sexual development.

The project
Fluoxetine, the trade name for Prozac, can be found in the brain and liver tissues in wild fish, and, just like in people, increases fishes’ serotonin levels. To understand how the drug upsets sex hormone levels in wild fish populations, Trudeau studies normal goldfish whose food intake, seasonal growth rates, and reproduction have been previously well studied.

The key
When Trudeau’s research group studied female goldfish injected with flouxetine, they found that multiple genes in the brain were affected, causing a decrease in estrogen levels in the blood. Some of these genes are known to have an impact on the reproductive and social behavior of fish. To make matters worse, fluoxetine has an impact on the secretion of growth hormones, causing the fish to feed less and to become underweight.
To simulate the levels of Prozac detected in the environment, another test was done where fluoxetine was added directly to the tanks of male goldfish. Trudeau’s team then added potent female sex pheromones to the water. This should have stimulated the healthy, normal males to release their sperm and fertilize the eggs. However, male goldfish that had been exposed to the fluoxetine completely fail to release their sperm.
Poor goldfish.

What’s he building in there?

The problem
Medical tests required to diagnose diseases need to be performed at specialized centres, causing long wait times and expensive costs. In addition, current analytical tools are limited to looking at only handful of the biomolecules that signal the onset of diseases, such as cancer.

The researcher
Michel Godin, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at the U of O, dreams of making disease testing as easy as scanning a barcode. Godin is part of the Interdisciplinary Nanophysics Centre labs where he mixes physics, chemistry, and biology to engineer hand-held microfluidic devices for the health sciences.

The project
Microfluidic devices are the computer chips of the chemistry world. Medical lab technicians search for biomolecules associated with disease—also called biomarkers—the way you would do math on an abacus: one by one. Godin wants to design a device that can take less than a drop of blood, purify it, and identify the presence of hundreds of biomarkers within seconds. That kind of speed would resolve the earlier inconveniences of wait time and would also allow better statistics for analysis. The device would be smaller than your cell phone and potentially cheap enough to be used in developing countries. Bigger isn’t always better—at least when you’re talking about microfluidic devices.

The key
But how would Godin’s device tell the hundreds of biomarkers apart? Some microfluidic devices integrate ultra-sensitive detectors that push biomarkers through tiny nanoscopic tunnels (or nanopores) capable of detecting single molecules as they pass. However, detecting molecules and telling them apart are two very different processes. While a nanopore might be able to detect biomarkers, it can’t distinguish between those that signal disease and perfectly normal biomolecules. To identify them, Godin wants to create a DNA scaffold—a long chain of single-stranded DNA that would attach specific biomarkers to unique spots along the DNA chain. By threading the DNA through the nanopore, Godin could read what biomarkers are present in the blood—exactly like scanning a barcode.