Descriptive transcript
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[On-screen] Genomics Research and Development Initiative: The EcoBiomics Project
[On-screen] James Macklin, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
The EcoBiomics Project is about monitoring biodiversity across Canada in different types of habitats.
The project itself focuses on two main components.
We're interested in the health of soil and the quality of water.
Canadians are very concerned about soil health because it really impacts our economy.
Agriculture relies on strong soils to produce and contribute, as does forestry.
On the water side, we, of course, care deeply about the quality of our water that we drink, but we also use it recreationally.
So we care about the water we swim in, and we care a lot about the fishing and other recreational activities associated with those habitats.
Traditionally, we, of course, spend a lot of time what we call in the field, studying the organisms where they're found.
But of course in this project we're dealing with micro-organisms, which are small.
You can't see them with the naked eye and you cannot assess their relationships.
So we bring them back to the lab, we process them and then we put them through a sequencer to get their genetic code.
[On-screen] Armand Séguin, Natural Resources Canada
Research fields, unfortunately, often operate in silos.
So the genius of EcoBiomics, in a way, is to integrate various different disciplines: agriculture, forestry and aquatic ecosystems.
Because each ecosystem nevertheless has its own impact.
So we need to have a more global perspective to foster this communication and this new approach.
[On-screen] Soil
[On-Screen] Christine Martineau, Natural Resources Canada
My role in the GRDI EcoBiomics Project is to do research on soil micro-organisms.
What we do mostly is assess the impact of different disturbances on soil micro-organisms, but also study how plant/micro-organism interactions can be used to promote the restoration of degraded sites.
In fact, soils are very important for several functions in our ecosystems.
Soils support the growth of plants and trees, too.
So that's extremely important because that's where plants and trees draw their nutrients in order to grow.
Soils perform other functions too, including purifying water, filtering it before it enters waterways.
So micro-organisms will also be involved in breaking down the contaminants that could be in the soil, thereby contributing to the quality of our water.
[On-screen] Water
[On-screen] Sophie Crevecoeur, Environment and Climate Change Canada
As part of the EcoBiomics Project, I lead one of the research projects in the field of aquatic ecology.
More specifically, I work on cyanobacteria, which are bacteria but also algae which can produce toxic blooms.
So we're looking at this community of cyanobacteria and also the rest of the microbial community that is associated with these cyanobacteria.
[On-screen] Charles Greer, National Research Council Canada
Toxic cyanobacteria blooms are a problem because they kill wildlife, they kill domestic animals and they can cause serious problems in humans because they're producing toxins when ingested and cause all kinds of problems.
When we see a toxic cyanobacterial bloom developing, we're looking specifically for the factors that are causing that development at that particular time.
[On-screen] Nathalie Fortin, National Research Council Canada
When nutrient concentrations are too high, cyanobacteria take over.
We see that the nutrients come from agricultural land.
But also, we must not forget that when there are overflows or wastewater overflows, these nutrients also come from the river.
[Sophie Crevecoeur] It's important to understand how the system works in order to be able to know how it will respond to future disturbances, for example to climate change.
[On-screen] Bioinformatics
[On-screen] Joe Giustizia, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
Bioinformatics in general is the application of data science practices to life science.
So you look at life science and the kind of data that's being generated in terms of genomic data, for example, which is literal sequences of genomes.
There's other kinds of data as well, environmental data, that sort of thing.
And data science is taking those things and combining them in interesting ways, sometimes incorporating things like machine learning or A.I. in order to produce some kind of useful insight.
[On-screen] Abiodun Laoye, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
So the different technologies that we've introduced as part of the bioinformatics team on the EcoBiomics Project have allowed the researchers to approach their research questions in new ways.
And this really allows them to get very creative and adventurous with the kinds of questions that they ask and the kinds of methods that they use to find their answers.
[James Macklin] I think the legacy of GRDI EcoBiomics is a baseline.
So we've started, we've observed in a lot of places, we've observed organisms that traditionally are not observed, and the intent is to maintain some of those observatories for a long time so that we can continuously come back, reassess and see what that change, what the impact on that ecosystem or that habitat really is.
That is super important to understanding how whatever the impacts are on that environment can be mitigated.
So the Government of Canada has a mandate to make the data that we generate and the knowledge based on that data open and open to other researchers, but also open to the general public.
And in doing so, that allows us to continue the research that we're doing into the years to come, but also allows other researchers who are interested in the same kinds of topics or perhaps other topics that we never considered when we captured this data that will add to the knowledge going forward.
[On-screen] Special thanks to:
- National Research Council Canada
- Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
- Environment and Climate Change Canada
- Natural Resources Canada
- Fisheries and Oceans Canada
- Canadian Food Inspection Agency
- Public Health Agency of Canada
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[On-screen graphic] Government of Canada wordmark
[On-screen] © Her Majesty the Queen in the Right of Canada. 2022