Shaker incubators for cultivation of bacteria

细菌、酵母和其他微生物在为人类提供有益服务和产品方面有着悠久的历史。这包括发酵(啤酒、葡萄酒)、食品生产(面包、奶酪)和救命药物(青霉素)的生产。这种为特定用途驯化微生物的过程一直持续到今天，但现在发生在分子水平上。今天，微生物体内的基因被特别地改变，以编程让生物体执行特定的任务。这样做可能是为了更多地了解有机体中基因的功能，或者是为了对微生物进行编程，以产生用于研究的有用分子，如蛋白质或药物。这项设备提案围绕六个摇床培养箱展开，女王大学四个不同实验室的研究生将使用它们在受控条件下培养微生物。这将使研究生能够研究产生类药物分子的细菌以及在细菌中产生蛋白质的细菌，以了解它们在疾病和细胞过程中的功能。例如，研究生将使用摇床从土壤和海洋细菌中获得新的抗生素，以解决对我们当前药物的抗生素耐药性上升的问题。学生们还将从致病细菌中产生蛋白质，以了解这些蛋白质是如何导致这些细菌引起的疾病的。最后，摇床将被用来生产通过基因组测序发现的独特的酶，以了解它们的机制。这将使这些酶能够发展成为环境友好型工业催化剂，并作为降解土壤和水体中的污染物的试剂。

Bacteria, yeasts, and other microbes have a long history of providing beneficial services and products to mankind. This includes fermentation (beer, wine), food production (bread, cheese), and production of lifesaving drugs (penicillin). This process of domesticating microbes for specific applications continues to this day, but now occurs at a molecular level. Today, the genes within the microbe are specifically altered to program the organism to perform a specific task. This may be done to learn more about the functions of genes in the organism, or to program the microorganism to produce useful molecules for study, such as proteins or drugs. This equipment proposal centres around six shaker-incubators, which will be used by graduate students from four different labs at Queen's University to cultivate microbes under controlled conditions. This will allow the graduate students to study bacteria that produce drug-like molecules as well as to produce proteins in bacteria in order to understand their function in disease and cell processes. For example, graduate students will use the shakers to access new antibiotics from soil and marine bacteria in order to address the rise of antibiotic resistance to our current drugs. Students will also produce proteins from pathogenic bacteria in order to understand how these proteins contribute to diseases caused by these bacteria. Finally, the shakers will be used to produce unique enzymes discovered through genome sequencing in order to understand their mechanisms. This will enable the development of these enzymes as environmentally friendly industrial catalysts and as agents for degrading pollutants found in soil and water bodies.