Sanofi BioGENEius Challenge Canada » Northern Manitoba

2011 Northern Manitoba: Student Finds Speed Treatment For Faster Growing Veggies

admin — Wed, 04 May 2011 14:52:48 +0000

Growing vegetables in Northern Manitoba has always been a challenge for Emily Klekta’s family, who operate a commercial market garden.

To help her family, the 16-year-old Swan River student has found a way to get seeds to germinate faster, even in the cold soils of her region.

“We grow and sell vegetables every summer,” says the Grade 11 student. “With poor weather, we have a lot of trouble growing them some years so I wanted to see if hydro-priming could help us and other farmers.”

Emily learned about the hydro-priming technique – in which a seed is exposed to water or other liquid to start the germination process before planting – from her mentor, Meghan Rose, a Rural Leadership Specialist with Manitoba Agriculture. Emily then studied the technical and scientific literature to design her own set of experiments for peas and corn.

The big challenge with hydro-priming is getting the seeds to halt the germination process before they begin to sprout. Quickly drying them at the right time proved to be the solution, but Emily’s first efforts ended up cracking the seeds and they wouldn’t grow properly. So, she adjusted her methods, including using fans instead of a dehydrator, and successfully grew out the seeds at different soil temperatures. In colder soils of her area, the hydro-primed seeds get a three-day jump on normal seeds in the germination race.

“We plan to experiment with hydro-priming some of our seeds for our market garden this year,” says Emily, who attends Swan Valley Regional Secondary School.

Says Ms Rose: “I was really impressed that Emily was able to understand the scientific papers on her own and add to our understanding of hydro-priming.”

Emily says the sanofi-aventis Biotalent Challenge helped her decide on plant science studies as a university pursuit and gave her an insight to the power of a positive attitude.

“If you set your mind on something and work hard for it, you can accomplish anything,” she says.

SABC 2011 Northern Manitoba

nlee — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 15:31:29 +0000

Heading into the big push to get projects done, the Northern SABC program has 10 projects, the highest number ever. This growth came about from students, teachers and administrators from Margaret Barbour Collegiate Institute in The Pas, Manitoba, supporting the program. The continued support of University College of the North for the teams from MBCI and the award-winning program at Swan River Regional Secondary School in Swan River has also helped bring the quality and participation of the Northern program to a higher level.

Like projects in the other parts of the country, our projects relate to ideas that may have some impact on many Canadians. This year’s program features an emphasis on the applications from biomedical engineering. One group is working on a biomedical application that will help diagnosis Alzeheimers and Parkinsons conditions. Another engineering driven opportunity is to work on mobile phone applications for biomedical measures. Several projects are examining the creation of bio-products and biofuels as well as agricultural and veterinary applications.

The Northern Manitoba SABC Competition will again be hosted by University College of the North on April 15. This year’s celebrated keynote speaker will be Dr. Lesley Warren, an environmental researcher from the geological science department at McMaster University. Among her interests are “green mining” and “clean water” both important topics to people living in the North.”

SABC Northern Manitoba 2010

nlee — Mon, 31 May 2010 18:47:11 +0000

The Northern Manitoba SABC program is in its third year as a pilot to determine how schools, teachers and students living away from large urban centres, where possible mentors for SABC are more common, can benefit from one of Canada’s most prestigious science programs for high school students. With Swan Valley Regional Secondary School student, Kirsten Larson, receiving the 2009 national prize for the project with the most promising commercial application, it is clear that students in the north can overcome the problems of time and space to participate and succeed in this program.

The NSABC program is still being built. MIndSet, as the host of the NSABC, hopes to increase the number of schools, teachers, students, communities and mentors participating from the North. To that end a Northern advisory committee has been recruited from interested organizations in the North including MAFRI and University College of the North. A training session for mentors has also increased the number of projects that one day might come out of Northern Manitoba.

In addition, there have been other signs that biotechnology and life science can attract more youth. Several students from northern centres attended the Youth Biomedical Laboratory Camp at the Inner City Science Laboratory during the past summer. Students, teachers and administrators involved in NSABC from Swan Valley Regional Secondary School in Swan River and Hapnot Collegiate in Flin Flon participated in a field trip to the Worthington, Minnesota veterinary medicine bioscience cluster. The purpose of these events have been to increase students’ knowledge and attraction to biotechnology. The Worthington experience, especially, was an outstanding learning experience as students had many hands on laboratory experiences.

Other schools contacted and interested in participating in the NSABC include Frontier Collegiate, Cranberry Portage, Joe A. Ross School in the OCN First Nations and Margaret Barbour Collegiate Institute in The Pas. Students from all these schools will be invited to the Student Biotechnology Conference being held in February.

Activities to provide educators with more background in biotechnology have also been undertaken including a hands on lab on the Chemistry of Food, followed by a screening of a segment of Kitchen Crimes as a vehicle for putting infectious disease into the context of student’s daily lives. At the same time, some of the teachers at SVRSS are moving from being consumers of biotechnology knowledge to being ‘creators’ of innovation with a partnership project with Microsoft Canada to look at the use of Microsoft’s OneNote as an organizational framework to organize biotech research from a number of text, audio, video and internet resources.

This year’s competition and awards event will be held April 8-9 in The Pas, Manitoba. For more information, please contact Norman Lee, nlee35@shaw.ca, or 204-269-3383.

Our 2010 Northern Manitoba Projects
Swan Valley Regional Secondary School (Swan River, Manitoba), 6 Projects, 7 students, Teacher Advisor: Paula Norman

Aaron Sagert , “Biodiesel in Oil Crops Using Camelina Seeds,” Mentor Dr. Jim Daun, Agrianalytical

Joel Hart and Dexter Bird, “Usage of Biofilms,” Mentor: Dawson Reimer, Medicue Inc.

Breanna Anderson, “Is Natural vs Processed Really Better: A Comparison of Nutrients in Colestrum,” Mentor Dr. Keith Immerkar, Swan Valley Vet Clinic

Taylor Henkelman, “Camelina can be a Viable Transformer Lubricant” Mentor: Carte International Inc.

Emily Klekta, “Hydroponic vs Traditional Tomato Growing Methods,” Mentor Betty MacLure, Swan Valley Vet Clinic

Bryce Betcher, “Snag Frequencies in New Forests,” Mentor Dan Soprovich, Manitoba National Resources and Conservation

Hapnot Collegiate,(Flin Flon, Manitoba), 2 Projects, 2 students, Teacher Advisor: Robyne Mansell

Mikayla Gawiak, “Biomimicry of Yellow Mould for Optimum Pathways,” Mentor: Dr. Jim Daun (facilitator)

Kris Sattelberger, “Toe Nail Clippings as a Diagnostic Indicator of the Presence of Arsenic or Heavy Metals,” Mentor: Various (facilitated by Norman Lee)

Oil from invasive “weed” shows promise as viable transformer lubricant

nlee — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 14:56:09 +0000

The camelina plant has seemed to many North Americas nothing more than an invasive weed.

Taylor Henkelman, of Swan River, Manitoba, however, sees a valuable resource.

Camelina is drought resistant, doesn’t mind the cold, needs virtually no pesticides to thrive, crowds out weeds and could have a variety of uses as an edible oil with high nutritional and other health benefits and / or as a bio-fuel.

Taylor, 15, a Grade 10 student at Swan Valley Regional Secondary School earned a ticket to the 2010 SABC national finals by examining the potential of camelina oil as a coolant in electrical transformers.

Today the majority of transformers are cooled by a nasty mix of petroleum products and harmful chemicals – though many companies are beginning to switch to soy oil as an eco-friendly alternative.

Soybeans don’t grow well in northern Manitoba, however, and are relatively expensive. Taylor decided to test oil from camelina, under the mentorship of Ralph Wegner, an engineer at Carte International of Winnipeg, which makes electrical transformers.

Transformer coolant oils need to resist electrical arcing.

Says Taylor: “We placed two electrodes fairly close together in the oil and ran electricity into them. We kept increasing the voltage to see if the oil was sufficiently resistant (to arcing).”

More tests are needed but Taylor�s results were promising and he plans further tests to see how it stands up to the cold.

Our 2010 Northern Manitoba Projects

nlee — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 11:31:06 +0000

Swan Valley Regional Secondary School (Swan River, Manitoba), 6 Projects, 7 students, Teacher Advisor: Paula Norman