Tiny dish earns big grant for UPEI
Professors from engineering and chemistry awarded government research funding
Two UPEI professors are working together to perfect a new kind of petri dish, and they have just gotten a grant to continue their project.
Ali Ahmadi and Russell Kerr aren’t the most obvious research colleagues. Ahmadi is an assistant professor in UPEI’s faculty of sustainable design engineering with a specialty in micro-fabrication, while Kerr is a professor in the departments of chemistry and biomedical science with a long history of discovering and producing novel bioactive compounds from marine sources.
But, when the two PhDholding researchers met in 2017, they knew right away they could work together.
Ahmadi and Kerr were awarded $250,000 from the federal government’s New Frontiers In Research Fund (NFRF) on Aug. 1 to continue their collaboration.
“There was obvious compatibility,” said Kerr, thinking back on that first meeting. “Researchers in my field are coming up against a phenomenon known as the ‘great plate count anomaly’. We can only culture in the sterile lab about one per cent of the microbes in samples we bring back. It is a barrier to finding and exploiting new microbial sources of natural products for drug discovery and other applications.”
Ahmadi’s research focuses on micro-fabrication in biomedical applications. Ahmadi could create a special, miniature “petri dish” – in this case, a sponge – that could be embedded within its home environment.
The idea is for Kerr’s team to use the new dish to catch microbes (bacteria, mold, fungi and other little life forms) in the wild and take them back to the lab to research.
The two researchers think they will be able to find more microbes when the miniature “petri dishes” are in their own ecosystems.
“We called the first generation of the ‘dish’ the MD Pod,” said Ahmadi. “It was a few centimetres in diameter, which posed some challenges in embedding it within the sponge. This award will allow us to fabricate an even smaller version – the Micro MD Pod – which will be just a few millimetres in size and will be used in corals.”
Ahmadi and Kerr co-supervised an engineering graduate student in Kerr’s lab. It was a fish-out-of-water scenario as the engineer integrated into the world of microbiology for the collaborative project.
“That was crucial,” said Ahmadi. “Engineers are often hampered by trying to solve a problem they don’t fully understand because they’re working away from the subject. By working within Dr. Kerr’s team, my student was better able to understand the technical challenge and come to a solution. It really underscores the value of interdisciplinary research.”