“By focusing attention, increasing knowledge and creating new opportunities with women and girls, we will create better inclusion,”

U of G political scientist Deborah Stienstra will lead a seven-year study to learn about challenges for women and girls with disabilities around the globe and to identify ways to dismantle barriers facing what is considered one of the most marginalized groups in the world.

“By focusing attention, increasing knowledge and creating new opportunities with women and girls, we will create better inclusion,” says Stienstra, who is director of U of G’s Live Work Well Research Centre and holder of the Jarislowsky Chair in Families and Work.

Supported by a $2.5-million federal Partnership Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the study will initially focus on the effects of the pandemic on women with disabilities in Canada, Haiti, South Africa and Vietnam.

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U of G researchers aim to test waste water to detect levels of the SARS-CoV-2 virus – released in human feces – from student residences. Detecting higher levels of the virus in the sewer system may help prevent outbreaks on university campuses, says food science professor Lawrence Goodridge.

He’s working on the project with other U of G researchers and scientists at Laval University and the Public Health Agency of Canada.

“We appear to be the first in Canada to test a campus residence and use the data to try to make the campus safer.”

Previous research shows that the virus appears in waste water roughly a week before it shows up in a population, says Goodridge, director of the Canadian Research Institute for Food Safety at U of G.

“If we find evidence of the virus in waste water, it’s an indication that there is potentially a problem coming up. With that information, we can then take steps to take early action against that potential problem.”

Engineering professor Ed McBean and student research assistants are now taking waste water samples at East Residence.

By identifying the virus in communities, says McBean, the research could help target individual testing more efficiently.

It could also reinforce public health practices from mask-wearing to handwashing, says Goodridge. “We appear to be the first in Canada to test a campus residence and use the data to try to make the campus safer.”

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The goal is to reverse the devastating effect of habitat loss due to human development. The species was declared endangered in Canada in 2012, and lives in only a few small pockets in the province.

“If it works, it will be a big achievement,” says integrative biology professor Ryan Norris, adding that he hopes the project will also yield insights about restoring other threatened creatures. He said no butterfly has been successfully reintroduced in Ontario.

NEWS: U of G Project Receives Federal Funding to Restore Endangered Butterfly

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The STREAM (Sequencing the Rivers for Environmental Assessment and Monitoring) project involves citizen scientists and dozens of members of Indigenous communities in collecting samples for data to monitor freshwater health.

“These communities are well aware of the potential issues affecting their environment and they want timely and comprehensive access to biodiversity information, especially for freshwater biomonitoring. We can provide that using cutting-edge metabarcoding techniques developed at U of G,” says project lead Prof. Mehrdad Hajibabaei, Department of Integrative Biology, and a member of the University’s Centre for Biodiversity Genomics.

Metabarcoding technology developed by his lab allows scientists to analyze DNA and identify numerous organisms at once.

“We can turn around results to a community group within two months using metabarcoding,” which is several times faster than methods that use microscopes to analyze single organisms, says Chloe Robinson, a post-doctoral researcher who is also STREAM’s project coordinator.

Many of Canada’s important but little-researched waterways are in lands where Indigenous peoples have lived for generations, Hajibabaei says.

“We have partnered with Indigenous communities and seek their perspective to understand which sites are most important. So these partnerships have been invaluable to helping us study the health of freshwater ecosystems.”

“Without these groups, it would be impossible to access remote sites to do this research. We hope to create new partnerships with more Indigenous communities so we can broaden this research.”

Data from the catalogued samples are shared with other STREAM project partners, including World Wildlife Fund-Canada, Living Lakes Canada, and Environment and Climate Change Canada.

For more information, please go to stream-dna.com.

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“This project really began from my frustration as a parent, noticing my child was always getting ill and consequently being told to stay home, me along with him,” says the project’s lead, Prof. Monica Cojocaru, Department of Mathematics and Statistics.

“I wondered if there might be better ways to figure out how to prevent more of these illnesses.”

The pairing of math and illness prevention is nothing new; modelling is often used to estimate the effectiveness of medical interventions such as vaccines in large populations, for example.

The first step to understanding how infections spread in a child-care centre requires mapping out typical contact patterns of the children among themselves and with staff and/or surfaces.

Cojocaru and her students are working with U of G’s Child Care and Learning Centre on the project. She says it will be a challenge, since kids move in unique ways at different stages in their development.

“They run everywhere, they bump into things and other kids, they roll on the floor, they put things in their mouths. So, in this environment, we can’t assume a rational element of behaviour in their movements,” she says.

The team will then simulate the introduction of several pathogens into its scale model, such as rotavirus, flu virus, respiratory syncytial virus and norovirus. Some of these pathogens travel in the air, some spread through one-on-one contact and some contaminate surfaces.

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Prof. Sam Hocker, Department of Clinical Studies, is undertaking a three-year study to learn more about the anti-cancer properties of cannabidiol and its potential for treating urothelial carcinoma, a difficult-to-treat bladder cancer in animals.

The project will provide much-needed research on veterinary applications of cannabis, said OVC dean Jeff Wichtel.

“Veterinarians and pet owners have been eager for information on the medical applications for cannabis,” he says. “This groundbreaking work will help us learn about the role of cannabinoids in cancer and advance this field of medical research in Canada.”

Most bladder carcinomas in humans are treated with surgery and immunotherapy, but some cases are harder to treat. Hocker says work with dogs could help design potential therapeutic options for more aggressive forms of bladder cancer in humans.

Medicinal cannabis is used to treat people, but currently, no products are licensed in Canada for treating animals. Lobbying is under way for legislation to allow veterinarians to authorize use of medical cannabis.

For this research, OVC received one of Canada’s first grants for veterinary cannabis research. Funding came from Grey Wolf Animal Health, a specialty animal health company.

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Researchers are studying ways to help plants produce their own all-important nitrogen.

“A plant must have nitrogen to grow, but it can’t produce the essential element on its own,” says Prof. Manish Raizada, Department of Plant Agriculture. “This is why we feed agricultural crops nitrogen fertilizer.”

But nitrogen fertilizers are manufactured through the burning of huge amounts of fossil fuel, and about 50 per cent of nitrogen fertilizer used on corn is wasted, either leaching into groundwater or turning into greenhouse gases, he says.

Specific microbes in plants can convert nitrogen in the atmosphere into plant food, so Raizada’s team is feeding plants these beneficial microbes.

Ultimately, he envisions a time when seeds coated with probiotic microbes and microbial sprays for soil could become commercial products. The researchers are also interested in exploring whether these microbes can make fertilizer on their own.

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Prof. Emma Allen-Vercoe, Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, is among 14 researchers from five countries on a research team looking to study connections between microbes in the body and cancer.
Her expertise in culturing gut microbes developed in her U of G lab – and its custom-designed “robo-gut” mimicking the workings of the large intestine – led the team’s principal investigators to invite her to join the project.

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