esearchers received funding totaling $1,275,000 over 2014-2019. Of the 11 who were successful, nine currently held a grant, while the remaining two regained funding after previous unsuccessful applications.
“Our success rate for those already holding a grant is an impressive 82 per cent, higher than the national average,” says Joffre Mercier, associate vice-president research of Natural and Health Sciences.
“This attests to the leading-edge quality of our researchers’ work and our growing reputation as a research-intensive university,” he said, adding that Brock received one Research Tools and Instruments (RTI) grant, giving Brock a 33 per cent success rate in that category.
Bidochka’s program, “Plant-fungal communication: using an endophytic insect pathogen fungus as a model,” will enable the scientists to have a deeper understanding of their earlier findings.
“The award will be used to continue research on beneficial fungi that are plant symbionts as well as insect pathogens,” says Bidochka. “We are hoping to implement our research findings into commercial applications of these fungi for plant growth promotion and general plant health.”
Chemist Travis Dudding and his group’s program, “A ‘superbasic’ approach to discovery,” will be using computer modeling to design new chiral molecules, chemical entities whose mirror images are not super-imposable, much like left and right hands.
Chiral molecules are the basic building blocks of life and are found in DNA, amino acids and proteins. That is why most life-saving medicines on the market today – for example, the cancer chemotherapy drug Paclitaxel – are chiral molecules.
Dudding explains that he and his team plan to simplify the “green process” of design by using state-of-the-art computing to model chemical processes for producing chiral molecules. The team will predict what will work experimentally rather than testing reactions in the laboratory “and thinking about how to improve them later,” which is how current chemical laboratory testing protocols are done.
“This