News

NSERC Student Research Awards given to Faculty of Agriculture students

Three Faculty of Agriculture students have been awarded Undergraduate Student Research Awards (USRA) from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) for the summer of 2013.

The awards, valued at a minimum of $4500 each for a 16 week period, are intended to stimulate an interest in research in the natural sciences or engineering as well as encourage students to pursue graduate studies or research related careers.  

“We believe that one person can make a difference and these prestigious awards will allow three of our top quality students to contribute to national research programs that will ultimately impact the industry in the areas of food, human health and the environment,” said Associate Dean Research Dr. Richard Donald.  ‘We are very proud of these students and very appreciative to NSERC for this opportunity.”

The students are supervised by NSERC research grant holders who provide the student with direction, facilities and resources for the research project.

The winners are Ed MacDonell, Enfield supervised by Dr. Sean Myles; Rachel Rix, Bible Hill, supervised by Dr. Chris Cutler and Brendan Grue, Bible Hill, supervised by Dr. Vasantha Rupasinghe.

Rachel will be studying insecticide hormesis, a stress phenomenon whereby low doses of insecticide actually increase reproductive outputs in insects.  Rachel will build off ongoing efforts to determine if aphids can communicate this type of stress response to each other, without actually being exposed to the stressor (insecticide).  She will also examine how the stress response correlates with induction of detoxification enzymes that aphids use to combat insecticides.

Ed will be helping to establish and maintain the Apple Biodiversity Collection - one of the largest apple collections in the world with over 1000 diverse apple cultivars (www.cultivatingdiversity.org).  Ed will help develop protocols for efficiently and accurately measuring agriculturally important traits like tree architecture, flowering time and tree growth.  In addition, he'll gain experience in the molecular lab by helping with DNA extraction and purification from apple and grape tissues.  The goal of his work is to collect the trait data in the field that is required to establish associations between genetic variants and traits.  These associations can then be used in the future in marker-assisted breeding programs that aim to generate novel, elite apple cultivars that are tasty and require less chemical input to grow.

Brendan will be investigating the anti-inflammatory properties of bioactives present in partridgeberry which is native to Newfoundland and Labrador. There are numerous health benefits of fruit bioactives, which have proven to be important in the prevention and management of many diseases.