|
'Best and brightest' ideas get $26m
DNA marker shares in funds
By John Gillis
| 
|
Over $26 million handed out Tuesday from the federal Atlantic Innovation Fund will support Nova Scotia-based research and technology dealing with everything from mapping bacteria's genes to fighting counterfeiting.
Federal Fisheries Minister Robert Thibault and Halifax West MP Geoff Regan were in Halifax to announce funding for six projects from a $300-million pot administered by the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency.
"These projects are among the best and brightest ideas Nova Scotia has to offer the world," Mr. Thibault said.
DNA Technologies, a division of Sydney's CrossOff Inc., got $1.8 million to expand its high-tech anti-counterfeiting system.
Companies with familiar brand names lose $385 billion US per year to firms peddling knock-offs. Some are going to great lengths to protect their products and images.
Marc de Jong of DNA Technologies said 50 per cent to 70 per cent of sports collectibles on the market are fakes. But his company can guarantee that your Levis are really Levis and that it's your favourite player's sweat on the "game-worn" jersey you just paid for.
The company marks goods with DNA-laced ink that's almost impossible to fake and can be identified with 100 per cent certainty.
The 120 footballs used in the last Super Bowl and later sold as collectibles were all tagged by DNA Technologies and can be verified with a simple scan.
The funds the company received will help develop technology that will allow agents to do a quick chemical analysis of the DNA mark - the results of which will stand up in court.
"Compared to our competitors, that will launch us quite a step ahead," said Mr. de Jong said.
Halifax software company MathResources Inc. received $2 million to develop Internet-based math courses focused on students' backgrounds.
MathResources president Ron Fitzgerald said the programs that have been written for the Internet so far are only the first generation.
"What we're trying to do with the (federal) money and with some of our own money is basically take it and build it to the next level," he said. "We believe that we can achieve that goal."
The biggest grant, $9 million over three years, went to Genome Atlantic, a non-profit union of several Atlantic Canadian universities, the National Research Council and Genome Canada.
Part of that money will be spent developing genetic profiles of potatoes. Lead investigator Barry Flinn said half the potatoes produced in Canada come from the Atlantic region. They generate over $1 billion in revenue.
The federal funding will help researchers pinpoint genes that make potatoes prone to diseases such as late blight, which cost the industry billions of dollars, in order to guide plant breeding techniques.
Another Genome Atlantic project, already underway, is mapping the genes of bacteria.
"The world is run by bacteria," said Ford Doolittle from Dalhousie University. "Without the activities of bacteria, we'd all be dead very quickly."
Analysis of trends in bacterial evolution that Mr. Doolittle and his colleagues at Genome Atlantic are finding may shed light on human diseases and on how to break down pollutants in the environment.
"I think we already are, in some areas at least, leading the world," Mr. Doolittle said. Because of the work that the funding will enable Genome Atlantic to do, he said, "I think we'll be the place to be."
Mr. Thibault is to name six more projects that will receive funding today. The first phase of the program has provided $155 million to 47 projects in Atlantic Canada.
| 
