Acquisition of an ultracentrifuge 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 quality of animal products, the health of consumers, and on the Canadian public health. Just one infectious disease like porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome causes around 150 millions dollars losses per year to the Canadian swine industry. Unfortunately, livestock industries have to deal with several other infectious diseases. Thus, it is crucial to improve the animal health status of the Canadian livestock to increase the sustainability of our agriculture. It is also important to reduce the frequency of animal diseases to improve the animal health and welfare, which are important societal issues. Ten researchers of the Faculté de médecine vétérinaire (FMV) at the Université de Montréal are members of research groups that possess international reputations and long-standing expertises in animal infectious diseases (Research Group on Infectious Diseases of Production Animals [GREMIP] and Swine and Poultry Infectious Disease Research Centre [CRIPA]. The GREMIP (the biggest research infrastructure at FMV) was founded in the early 80s and in that period, several kinds of scientific equipment were acquired to perform experiments in a biosecurity level 2 (BSL2) environment. Since its foundation, the GREMIP has been holding three ultracentrifuges. Unfortunately, the older two have been out of order since 2016 and mid 2019 while the third one recently started to have intermittent malfunction problems. Overall, the increasing needs of FMV researchers for an ultracentrifuge, that also meets the new biosecurity standards, are significant. The ultracentrifuge requested in this proposal is crucial to address the present and future research needs for the FMV microbiologists. Our animal bacteriologists, immunologists, parasitologists, and virologists' research topics are various and include: food safety; antimicrobial (and anthelmintic) resistance and alternative to antibiotic use; antiviral, vaccines and diagnostic tests development; and in vitro/in vivo microbial pathogenesis. The ultracentrifuge is a multipurpose scientific instrument. Thus, it is an indispensable tool used by FMV researchers on a regular basis for many different purposes like nanoparticles and bacterial surface/cell wall components purification. Nanoparticles are very small structures (<300 nm) like viruses, extracellular vesicles and exosomes. Exosomes are vesicles produced by cells (including infected and diseased cells) and are carriers of molecules that can transfer signals to neighboring cells, affecting the host response to diseases. Nanoparticles purification is a crucial step for the success of the FMV animal diseases research programs. Therefore, the requested ultracentrifuge is an essential tool for our research programs, allowing to contribute significantly to the training of highly qualified personnel, i.e. more than 40 FMV undergraduate and graduate students each year.