Acquisition of a high-speed high-volume floor centrifuge to support research in the field of veterinary infectious diseases

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Animal health has a major impact on the profitability of Canadian agriculture, the animal products quality, the health of consumers, and on the Canadian general public. Just one viral infectious disease like porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome causes around 150 millions of dollars losses per year to the Canadian swine industry and unfortunately, this industry has to deal with several other infectious diseases. Thus, it is crucial to improve the overall animal health status of the Canadian livestock. Ten researchers of the Faculté de médecine vétérinaire (FMV) at the Université de Montréal are members of a research group that possess an international reputation and long standing expertise in the field of swine infectious diseases (the Research Group on Infectious Diseases of Production Animals (GREMIP)). This group was founded in the early 80’s and in that period, several scientific equipment were acquired to perform experiments in a biosecurity level 2 (BSL2) environment. Unfortunately, the GREMIP’s 30 year old high-speed high-volume floor centrifuge (HS-HV/FC) has been out of order since late 2014, even after several attempts to repair it. Another, 33 year old, BSL2 HS-HV/FC is available at FMV but still has several electronic and mechanical problems (defect in the temperature control, timer out of order, ice formation in the centrifuge tub, etc.). Overall, the FMV HS-HV/FC apparatus have reached their useful life and need to be replaced as soon as possible. The equipment requested in this proposal, i.e. HS-HV/FC, will address the present and future research needs of the FMV research microbiologist’s community. Bacteriologists, epidemiologists, immunologists, parasitologists and virologists are working within GREMIP and their research topics are various and include: bacterial biofilm and quorum sensing, food safety and zoonotic diseases, antimicrobial resistance and alternative to antibiotic use, host resistance, vaccines and diagnostic tests development, antiviral, antiprotozoal, bacterial pathogenesis, viral pathogenesis and co-infections pathogenesis. The HS-HV/FC is a laboratory expensive equipment but it is also a multipurpose basic scientific instrument. Thus, it is an indispensable tool used by GREMIP researchers on a regular basis for many different purposes such as: bacterial, parasites and viral stock productions which are essential for microbiologist’s every day work, large antigen productions (purification of pathogen components and recombinant proteins) which are essential for vaccine development and other applications as well as production and purification of pathogen molecules such as lipids, polysaccharides and proteins. With the help of the HS-HV/FC, more than 35 undergraduate and graduate students will be supervised and trained by the GREMIP researchers every year, contributing significantly to the training of highly qualified personal.