Bioreactors for bioprocessing research

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The proponent has recently embarked on a major research effort in collaboration with Dartmouth College, NH and an industrial partner with the objective to develop cost effective bioconversion of cellulosic biomass such as grass and wood for ethanol production. There are currently three Ryerson-based graduate students involved in the project and at least two more will join the team in September 2008. The current project involves a strong collaboration with Dr. Lee Lynd at Dartmouth College, NH and an industrial sponsor. One student spent the summer of 2007 at Dartmouth College, and it became clear that we need to perform chemostat experiments at Ryerson in addition to our ecology and microscopy contribution to the collaboration; among others to facilitate inter-laboratory comparisons and to avoid delays in evaluating our microbial consortia. Our partners therefore made two new chemostat bioreactors available for our laboratory, which need to be returned by September 2008 and 2009, respectively. This submission requests support to purchase replacements for these reactors. Students from at least two colleagues at Ryerson and at least one collaborator from University of Toronto will also benefit from this system. Although the primary need for the equipment in our laboratory is to conduct kinetic studies of cellulolytic anaerobic microbial communities (at least two chemostats are needed to allow replicate experiments), we regularly need such equipment for our fundamental studies to compare the biofilm (attached cells) phenotype with their planktonic counterparts. The latter is the research focus of two other graduate students in our group, while another student will join them in 2008 as part of a recently-funded NSERC Strategic project in partnership with collaborators at McMaster University and Environment Canada.   Our department experienced notable growth in environmental sciences, with two recent (2006/2007) and one future (2008) appointment in environmental microbiology; together with the Molecular Sciences graduate program introduced in fall 2006 there is a growing need for chemostat bioreactors.