Miniaturized Growth Chambers for the Isolation of "Unculturable" Bacteria

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In the proposed project, to improve the current in situ bacteria isolation systems used by Nautilus, a noveldevice will be fabricated and tested to enable single-step growth and isolation of new bacteria that have, thusfar, resisted attempts to domesticate. Nautilus Biosciences Canada Inc. is a marine biotechnology companyfocused on the discovery and development of marine-derived natural products with applications in human andanimal health and wellness. Nautilus isolates and cultures bacteria from diverse geographic locations rangingfrom the tropics to Canada's Arctic. One of the main challenges to this type of compound discovery is thelimited ability of culturing cells, usually bacteria, in vitro. In fact, "The Great Plate Count Anomaly" suggeststhat only about 1% of bacteria are cultivable in laboratories. The remaining 99% are considered 'uncultivable',or have slow growth, due to the lack of chemical and physical factors present in the bacteria's naturalenvironments. Therefore, there is an increasing need for development of high throughput in situ technologiesfor cultivation of uncultivable species. The proposed microencapsulation chambers would address this need,and allow for greater culturing efficiency and a broader screening capability for therapeutics. To address thelimitations of the current iChip designs, we propose a new design of a growth chamber and amicrofluidic-based method of encapsulating bacteria in agarose micro-beads. Thus, the research proposedcould lead to the isolation of new bacteria which produce new, bioactive natural products.