Joint research work on crops’ drought tolerance and on how fresh foods can fight disease is up for $900,000 in Manitoba government funding.
The province on Tuesday said it will fund three research projects at the University of Manitoba that involve work-sharing with three different institutions in Australia. They include:
- study of how plants and crops adapt to climate change and how they can grow better in drought conditions, to be done by the U of M department of plant science and the South Australia Research and Development Institute’s innovative plant and food division;
- study of how fresh, unprocessed foods or food supplements can be used to prevent, help control or slow the progress of chronic diseases such as arthritis, heart disease, diabetes and cancer, to be done by the U of M’s Richardson Centre for Functional Foods and Nutraceuticals and the University of South Australia’s nutritional physiology research centre; and
- research on how cellular diseases, such as cancer and arthritis, get into human cells and what triggers them to spread, to be done by the U of M’s Manitoba Centre for Proteomics and Systems Biology and the University of Adelaide’s school of molecular and biomedical science.
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Each of the three projects will get $600,000 in total funding over three years. Manitoba’s $900,000 share will come from the International
development with other jurisdictions. The state government of South Australia will provide the other $900,000.
“Issues like the potential of dairy proteins to mitigate disease, the impact of climate change on crops and the progression of
disease within the human body are matters that are not specific
to Canada or North America,” U of M president Emoke Szathmary said in the province’s press release.
“In
such collaboration lie the seeds of solution to the problems we
confront though we live on the opposite side of the globe.”
