Gamma counter for radioimmunoassays and cellular microbiology

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Two broad research needs motivate this equipment grant request to purchase a gamma counter: one focusing on the role of stress in the natural world and the other focusing on human health issues. For the first, the broad scale objectives of our research programs are to understand the ecology and evolution of mammals in nature, both at the individual and population levels, and the factors that both proximately and ultimately affect their success or failure. One of the fundamental realities of existence is the need to cope with stress. It impacts all organisms daily, affecting the ability to respond to challenges, compromising health, and accelerating the rate of aging processes. Animals in nature are exquisitely adapted to deal with short-term, but not chronic, stressors. The stress axis is a pivotal part of the neuroendocrine system that integrates environmental change and through which life history decisions to reproduce, to grow, or to put energy into storage are implemented. It is also subject to permanent modification by maternal programming during or after pregnancy. Five of us (from the Universities of Alberta, UBC, Guelph, Toronto, and Trent) work in northern Canada, a region where the inhabitants - plant, animal, and human - will be under enormous challenges given the changes that will occur this century as a result of global climate change. The requested equipment will allow all of us to integrate hormonal measures of the stress axis into our research programs using gamma emitters from commercially available kits. The second research need is related to two programs addressing fundamental research on human health. Both programs are based at the University of Toronto. First, it will be used in a program to understand how psychostimulants (drugs such as cocaine) affect behavioural and neurobiological responses to stress. Second, it will be used in the study of mammalian disease responses - the host cell-microbial mechanisms responsible for pathogenicity and the triggering of immune reaction or tolerance.