Biodiversity Institute of Ontario wins national award funding
The University of Guelph’s Biodiversity Institute of Ontario (BIO) was awarded a significant grant from Innovation Canada on Jan. 23, 2015. The Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) awarded BIO with a $2.15 million grant for their research on DNA Barcoding.
Minister of State (Science and Technology), Ed Holder, was present during the awards announcement in Quebec City.
“We are providing support to some of Canada’s most promising national research facilities,” explained Holder during the announcement.
CFI’s Major Science Initiative (MSI) funds large-scale scientific and technological initiatives that would otherwise be too big to acquire funding from traditional sources. BIO is one such large-scale scientific initiative.
“Often referred to as ‘Big Science,’ [an MSI] addresses a set of leading-edge scientific problems or questions of such significance, scope, and complexity that it requires unusually large-scale facilities and equipment, substantial human resources, and complex operating and maintenance (O and M) activities,” explained the CFI website.
The MSI, through the CFI, contributes to projects’ operating and maintenance funds.
“The total CFI funding (including [the infrastructure operating fund] or the O and M portion of the International Joint Ventures award), will not exceed 40 per cent of the total eligible O and M costs,” said the CFI website.
As such, projects are still eligible for other sources of funding, as the CFI does not provide all of a project’s funding.
Including DNA Barcoding, BIO is home to four research divisions.
The BIO website explains that “this facility is home to various functional working groups and specialized infrastructure units that contribute to BIO’s mission.”
DNA Barcoding was initially introduced to the scientific community by Dr. Paul Hebert, a researcher at the University of Guelph. His paper, “Biological identifications through DNA barcodes,” presented the idea that species identification could be accomplished using DNA.
“My colleagues and I are very grateful for this support from CFI’s Major Science Initiatives program,” said Hebert in a University of Guelph news release. “This award is a strong endorsement of BIO’s efforts to better understand and protect the millions of species that share our planet.”
A DNA Barcode functions much like a product’s UPC code, allowing researchers to accurately identify and catalogue species. Specimen DNA is extracted and studied in a lab setting, before researchers record a species’ specific genetic sequence. The barcode is then placed into the Barcode of Life Data Systems (BOLD) database, where it can be searched for by other scientists and researchers.
BIO’s barcode library now stores more than 3.5 million records.