McGill PhD student Nancy Perreault samples the microbiology at the Gypsum Hill cold saline spring on Axel Heiberg Island in the Canadian high Arctic.
The Arctic prospector is typically regarded as an unruly breed - broad shoulders, bushy face, quick temper. That's why talking to Francis Nano can be a bit of a letdown.
"Sorry, but we're not big, rough individuals; we're a bunch of nerds in laboratories," said Dr. Nano, one of a growing but unorganized cluster of polar bio-prospectors - researchers who collect and test resilient microbes found in the most extreme corners of the Arctic for potentially lucrative use in everything from laundry soap to ice cream to cancer medicine.
It's a rich northern sweepstakes in which Canada lags far behind other nations - but a few researchers hope to change that. "It's an area so new that people are racking their brains trying to think what they can do with it," Dr. Nano said. "I can see it really taking off over the next few years."
If it doesn't, Canada risks losing out in the heated global hunt for polar microbes. A 2008 UN report noted that of 43 companies working on exploiting genetic resources in the Arctic, just two were Canadian-based. Last year, the Norwegian government launched a national marine bio-prospecting strategy that offers funding and direction for research teams.
"Certain nations have decided that they would invest some significant research dollars toward polar bio-prospecting," said Lyle Whyte, a McGill microbiologist who collects microbes from Nunavut's Axel Heiberg Island. "I've had discussions with a few companies here about my research, but not much has come of it." By contrast, representatives from a Norwegian company are touring Canada, soliciting ideas for using Arctic enzymes in its dairy products. "The field is maturing in Canada, but we're still behind," Dr. Whyte said.
That nascent quality is what drew chemistry professor Russell Kerr from the Caribbean to Canada four years ago. After decades of looking for commercially viable genes in and around the Bahamas, he decided the area was too crowded with fellow scientists so he scoured a map. "I realized Nunavut was completely untouched in terms of bio-prospecting," he said.
Soon after, he took a position at the University of Prince Edward Island with an eye on sojourning north. Last week, he was tromping around Iqaluit striking profit-sharing agreements with government and Inuit groups. "They're used to groups coming up to study polar bears and seals and things," Dr. Kerr said, "not microbial diversity in sediment."
Later this summer, Dr. Kerr will return to the North to cruise into Frobisher Bay with a missile-like instrument he and his grad students call the Mud Scud. The scud scoops clumps of microbe-teeming sediment from ocean bottoms. Through a complex screening process, Dr. Kerr hopes to find unique actinomycetes, the microbes that give us 70 per cent of the world's ever-shrinking library of usable antibiotics. "People all over the world are looking madly for these," said Dr. Kerr, who has six private companies and academic groups supporting his research.
It's needle-in-a-haystack work, but the potential benefits are huge. In his lab at the University of Victoria, Dr. Nano recently developed a novel method of deploying Arctic microbes that holds the potential of warding off killer diseases.
When the cold-loving, or psychrophillic, bacteria heat up, they die. So Dr. Nano and his team swapped nine genes from psychrophillic microbes into the pathogen Francisella novicida, normally deadly to mice. The genetic exchange lowered the pathogen's maximum heat tolerance from 45 Celsius to 33. In practical human terms, that means the bug will reproduce in colder extremities of the body but die before reaching warmer vital organs. The researchers found the new temperature-sensitive strain actually inoculated the mice against the pathogen. Dr. Nano thinks a similar process could vaccinate humans against TB, which kills more than a million people a year.
Already these Arctic enzymes are used in cold-water laundry detergents, certain dairy products and facial creams. A couple of holy grails remain to be found: a cancer killer and a microbe that breaks down waste wood material into biofuel - both of which could yield billions of dollars. But for all this potential, Dr. Whyte, the McGill researcher, is still waiting for a commercial suitor. Recently, he was part of a research team that discovered a methane-consuming Arctic microbe that proves similar life could exist on Mars.
"I have a fridge of really interesting stuff we've isolated from all sorts of weird and wacky places," he said. "They definitely have some biotech applications, but I don't have time, money or bodies to get it going."