If you are a Chem 200 student, please make sure that you can see easily, that you can hear me okay, and also that you have an abstract sheet. If you don't have one yet, just point the person beside you and at the end of the rows, they can grab one and pass it to you. So if you are a CAM 200 student, welcome.
This is how we typically begin our fall semester at King's where you hear about the research done by other students just like you were, or they were just like you a couple of years ago. students who are in their second, third, fourth, or maybe they've just graduated years of education, and they're going to tell you about the types of research. It ranges from biology all the way to computing science that they've done working with professors at King's this summer. It's pretty amazing to see all the things that they are able to do and accomplish in just four months, and when you're sitting here listening, there's going to be lots of details that are probably over your head and you think, I don't really know what they're doing. talking about that's okay what I want you to get out of that is they were sitting in these chairs maybe just a year ago maybe two years ago and can you imagine yourself in a year's time in two in three years time doing this caliber of research speaking the things that they're saying knowing the things that they know doing the research they're doing all right it's an amazing opportunity so dream a little bit about what this tells you you might be doing in a couple of years time.
Try to take a couple of notes for each of the talks. As mentioned, I'm going to ask you something about these research talks on test number one. It's not going to be super detailed, but it's going to be something about maybe the themes or something that stuck out to you about what you were hearing.
The flash talks are going to go until 1.50. After that, we're going to move to the other side of the atrium and you'll see the posters are set up. all around and this is where you actually get a chance to go up and say hey you mentioned something about this in your talk can you explain it more or again if you're in Chem 200 we've talked about bioassays you're going to hear about some pretty important bioassays today we've talked about separations in class you're going to hear two big projects involving separations as well as characterization of compounds ask those students to go into a bit more detail how do you separate How do you do your bioassay?
How do you characterize your compounds? So now for the speakers, you're going to come up unannounced. So you have the schedule in front of you.
Dr. Ooms is going to finish with the next little bit. And after that, our speakers are going to come up one at a time. You will introduce yourselves. You'll have six minutes. At the end of six minutes, you're done.
The next person will come up. If they're done early and you have a burning question, feel free to ask. presenter your question.
Otherwise, if we're sticking to the timeline and there's not a chance to ask a question, please find them afterwards in the poster session. Alright, with that, I'd like to welcome our VPAR and also chemist, Dr. Christopher Eades. Alright, yes, as Leah said, although they only let me out of my office now to give semi-important speeches and awards, I was really a worker.
I did it as a chemist once, and I still am. And someday I will be back in the lab. This is a great celebration of summer research, a great celebration of who we are as a university.
We work together, first year students, second year students, third year, fourth year, with professors who have been doing this for four years to 40 years. And we do research, real research together. And so I'm privileged to be here and to celebrate with you.
I do also have two awards to give out today. For years, decades now, there's been two chemistry awards. One that has gone to the person who gets the highest grades in intro chem, and one who is going into their last year and has the highest grades. So this is an opportunity to do that.
And so I'm going to start with the first year chemistry award. This is given to someone who has regurgitated the case studies well on their tests, has filled out a project lab book like Cindy wants you to, and can balance equations. So our first year chemistry award for 2024 goes to Riley Uvanta. That's right. And that of course goes up in the hall if you've seen it there.
Alright, so the second award, this is actually one that comes from From the Chemical Society of Canada. That's the sort of national body for chemistry. And it gives us our accreditation here at King's for our degree. It has been given out for over 20 years now.
add another name to the series of plaques. You know the other names sitting on here are include Leah Martin, Cassie Van Der Schee and yes myself so this is the first step to getting a job at King's if you want to know. And this year our award winner is Sarah Gradanis.
And with that we're going to start the talks. Let's get to it. Okay, good afternoon everybody. I'm Kira Medel and this summer I did some research work with Dr. Vischer.
Together this summer we looked at the disease prevalence of pyconosis and toxoplasmosis in Canadian free-roaming wild pigs. So to start us off, you may or may not have been aware, but wild pigs are the destructive invasive species that are spreading throughout Canadian prairie provinces. They carry a multitude of zoonotic diseases, including toxoplasmosis, which is called by the protozoan parasite Toxoplasma gondii, and trichinosis, which is caused by the nematode parasite Trichinella species. I won't get into the details of the life cycles of these parasites, but they both can be transmitted to humans and caused by humans. cause human disease through consuming tissues and undercooked meat.
Though wild pigs are recognized globally as common carriers of both trichinosis and toxoplasmosis, the infection status of Canadian wild pigs remains unknown. So there is a large research gap that we are trying to cover. So on that end, we ended up with a total of 293 wild pig diagrams that were collected between 2018 to 2024 from provincial eradication efforts. As you can see on the map, the samples were collected from...
four alternate counties, the Woodlands County, Black St. Anne County, Strathcona County, and Two Hills County. The tissue fluid from these samples was analyzed using an enzyme linked immunosorbent assay, or otherwise an ELISA test, and because ELISA is not what is classified as a gold standard test, we then also calculated the true prevalence using the reported specificity and sensitivity of our kids. So to the excitement of me and Dr. Vischer, but perhaps not the rest of Canada, we actually discovered the first evidence of trichinosis and toxoplasmosis in Canadian wild pigs. So for the toxoplasmosis, there is a total of 27 out of 200... 252 wild pigs that tested positive for antibodies against Toxoplasma gondii.
This resulted in a true prevalence of 15.3%. For the Trichinosis, we found 11 out of 293 wild pigs to be positive for antibodies against the Trichinella species, which gave a true prevalence of 3.8%. So not only was this one of the first wild pig studies done in Canada, but it is also one of the few studies that had the opportunity to look at a whole sounder worldwide. A whole sounder consists of wild pigs that all live together in a group.
This came up with an interesting discovery, where we found that solitary wild pigs had significantly higher prevalence when compared to wild pigs living within a sounder group. This finding has interesting implications for disease spreading control, but also for understanding the transmission dynamics of this disease to wild pigs. So clearly this newfound knowledge does have some considerations and implications for Canadians. Of course, looking at this image, the direct implication is for anyone considering eating Canadian wild pigs, you may want to be very careful about how you're cooking it. You will want to cook it to at least 77 degrees Celsius in order to prevent human disease, because they may potentially be infected with trichinosis or toxoplasmosis.
However, there is also some indirect implications seen through the fact that wild pigs can also be the indicator species for both trichinosis and toxoplasmosis. Though the mode of transmission of these diseases means that direct transmission from wild pigs to herbivorous animals is unlikely, as again it involves consuming tissues which herbivorous animals are not likely to do, the presence of sylvatic trichinosis can be a major factor in the transmission of these diseases. ...and toxoplasmosis does indicate concern for non-biosecure animals, including domestic livestock and wild game. This, of course, leads to the same results, where care should be taken when consuming and working with meat from non-biosecure animals in order to prevent human disease. Again, making sure to cook to at least 77 degrees Celsius.
Overall, these findings highlight the importance of education for wild game consumers. Making sure that they are aware that wild pigs can carry these diseases and take the necessary precautions. And then also prevention strategies for at-risk livestock.
It also does highlight the risk of disease that these wild pigs have as invasive species and why they are at risk of convenience. Thank you guys for your attention. We may have time for a question. We're a bit ahead of schedule.
Sure! I talk fast but I'm nervous. Any questions for Kira?
Is there any data from the United States or other countries? Yes, so for the United States, they have quite a few wild case and they have found that the prevalence in both trichinosis and toxoplasmosis has been increasing. Toxoplasmosis is at 40% and trichinosis is at 30%, I believe. I don't remember the exact numbers.
So hello, my name is Kaylee and I worked on a series of projects this summer actually which were kind of collecting under urban ecology of hares and coyotes in Edmonton and their implications for human conflict. So first of all, I worked with white-tailed jackrabbits. So in particular, I worked on the white-tailed jackrabbit project being run by Dr. Fisher. It's made of two major components, of which there's a genetic and a movement component.
is pretty much finished. I actually had the privilege of working on it over this past winter and we were able to submit those for genetic testing and we're still getting the results back. But I mostly worked on the movement or GPS based component this summer working on research, protocol, and in the forms.
I filled forms for what's called the animal care committee that just makes sure that when we're handling or using animals that's being done ethically so I had to fill out those forms. And I also helped with another part of, it's not really the Whitetail Jackrabbit project, but it's in regards to Whitetail Jackrabbits where we want to research skin and viral parasites. There is very little research in Whitetail Jackrabbit diseases, so this is really important for filling that research gap and also just helping inform like what kind of diseases can they spread and how does it affect their behavior. Diseases can affect their behavior.
behavior and we especially see this with coyotes which I will explain with urban coyote diets. So sometimes diseases they will take away their nutrients and so they will be forced to utilize food sources that they're not that they won't normally utilize. So I worked with a U of A graduate student over the summer who collected food sky samples from all around the city.
They sent them to me and I collected fecal matter. for them to test for diseases, but I also had the privilege of looking and seeing what they were eating. And as you can see in this lovely little paragraph I made, apples were the highest preference for what they ate the most.
This is actually crab apples in particular, and not your normal big apples that you eat from the grocery store. But also really interesting just in terms of them being attracted to RERs, it's brutal. They can't really get bird seed from anywhere but our yards, so it's really interesting to see that it's like the third highest food component in their scat. So this just has implications in terms of them coming into our yards and being in greater conflict with us. Most of us who live around here at least have some herd of people being attacked by coyotes, having their pets attacked by coyotes.
So understanding why they're coming into our yard, they're going to be in great conflict greater conflict with us, it was really important for trying to lower the risk of conflict with them. And there is an increasing level of conflict with coyotes in urban settings. So that leads me to the last part that I...
This summer was on toxoplasmosis which is kind of like what Kira did except we're doing it in kayaks. We're collecting samples. I actually went to the Alberta association rendezvous that they held in Barhead this summer.
I went and I got to talk to trappers and hunters and we gave them little sample kits where we will get hair, claw, and blood samples. The blood samples we will be able to use for toxoplasmosis, which is curious that is a hard site that they have to get by ingesting, but it's really interesting because toxoplasmosis is only able to reproduce cats or felines, so we're really interested in seeing is there an increasing prevalence in places like the city where we have a lot of feral cats compared to urban settings and sorry compared to rural settings where there might not be as many cats for them utilize as a prey source and just with toxoplasmosis we also have the interesting effect of it does make males more aggressive it's really interesting actually that this disease has that tendency because it also has the tendency to make females more affectionate so we're just kind of trying to tease out like is the reason we're seeing a increase in conflicts in kites in urban settings because of this disease and we'll be testing that I have a question. When you showed the diet of the coyotes and it said natural prey, is cats a big part of that or cats and jackrabbits? Cats and jackrabbits would be some of the food sources they utilize. We collected it in a larger group because, first of all, I am not a hair expert, and that's how we usually determine whether they were eating natural prey, was by the presence of some hair.
So we usually categorized it as short and small mammals. longer being like some smaller mammal but not like a mouse and then like deer hair and that was all I was able to really classify and I didn't really put it in its own separate category it was just all one so but cats and whitetail jackrabbits yes would be one that they utilize and was the second highest component I found in the scan Thanks, Amy. My name is Raymond Whealy and I worked with Dr. Leah Martin-Bisher this year on discovering phages that target the current bacteria. So what is carboxybacteria?
Carboxybacteria are bacteria that help protect and ferment food. They protect and ferment vegetative meat and dairy. products but they can also produce compounds organic compounds that cause food spoilage our solution to this problem is bacteriophages which are viruses that essentially kill certain strains of certain species of bacteria our research focuses on carna bacterium multimoradicum and carna bacterium divergent species bacteriophages kill their host in two cycles the lightest cycle which where they insert their DNA into the cell and it bursts within a short period of time and the lysogenic cycle where the DNA is inserted into the host DNA and it remains there until some sort of stimuli happens and the cell bursts later.
So some of the previous discoveries that we've discovered I guess were in 19... 1997 when we first discovered CD1 which is the first phase to target the C divergence species. Then in 2021 where we discovered CD2, CD3, and CD4.
And in 2022 where we discovered CD5, CD6, CD7, and CM1 which is the first phase to target the C Multimorticum species. Our research goals for this year are split into three sections, characterizing phage CM1, characterizing phage CD5, and some new phages that we discovered this summer. Before I get into that, I would like to talk about our key bioassays that we performed this year. It's called a double agar overlay, We took a phage sample that we affected in some way.
We diluted it down and mixed it with soft agar and a host bacteria. We then over... overlaid it onto an agar plate and left it to incubate. When we came back, the host bacteria would grow and we would see tiny dots along the plate if there were any phage present. This indicated another phage present, sorry.
And the more dots that we saw, the more phage that was there. Our first experiment was temperature stability. As you can see here, we have a generally stable, generally wide temperature stability range, but at 100 degrees it was not functional. You can see something similar with our pH balance ranges where we have a generally stable, generally wide range of pH stability but we have a decrease or a it's non-functional at a pH of 2. We also performed what's called a killing curve where we took a the host bacteria of CM1 and we added different concentrations of CM1.
We added different traces of CM1. We got the expected results where we have different amounts of bacterial death but around the time our point we started seeing growth of bacteria so we began to wonder whether the CM1 was glycogenic or if these bacteria were just resistant to phage so we extracted the living DNA or the DNA of these bacteria and examine them for phage here and since we don't see any phage DNA we know that CM1 is not glycogenic With CD5, we also did temperature and stability experiments. The temperature, again, for CD5 was, there is a wide temperature stability, but it's not functional at a temperature of 100. When we examined its pH stability range, we also saw that it had a wide pH stability range, but was not functional at a pH of 2. This year we also discovered three new phages.
So we essentially took our stock of bacteria, took a stock of bacteria and we added phage that we had collected. We were able to get about ten samples. of possible phage and we were able to isolate three. These are CD8, CM3, and CM2, as you can see there with the little plaques. We then did three rounds of pure purification on this phage.
And I'm sorry. We did three rounds of purification and we're to get a high concentration of these phages. And we did something called transmission electron microscopy. So we were able to develop these three pictures of our phages.
As you can see, they all have flexible tails. And they're all very similar to phages that we've collected. evidence of before.
So in conclusion we seem to have completed all the goals that we set up to do this summer. However, we did want to redo an absorption study that we did this summer as well as repurify the pages that we collected in order to get better results and possibly present next year. I'd like to thank Dr. Leon-Branda Bichir, Dr. Casey Norton at the U of A, the Lacombe Research Center scientists.
as well as the King's University and CERC for allowing us to help or allowing us to research this project. Any questions? Oh yeah, go for it.
Can you go back to the picture of these friends of ours? Can you? Next. No, that one.
How many people in the world have seen those three things? Oh, these ones specifically? Yeah. Probably just...
Just us. Three people. Yeah.
So, everyone in the room, you're now the fourth plus tied person to ever see these things, which are in the world, you discovered. Drop the mic. Yeah!
Yeah! Yeah, there's more questions. I just wanted to say that.
So, Chem 200, there's a pretty important bioassay that she described, so make sure you know that. No one has a question. I was going to ask if you could repeat the bioassay. Oh, yeah. Sorry, I was going to go a little fast.
So, did you want to talk about the key one that we did, or just the ones that we did to discover these features? Oh, okay, so essentially what we did was we took bacteria that we already had in stock and we collected fades from just various things, meme processing collections that we had. And so we laid out all these bacteria on agar plates and we would add phage to all of them essentially and we just kind of looked and saw what our results were. Like if they had plaques we knew that there were phage there.
So I'll just add. So you guys saw in class, that would be bacteria growing all over the place. And then Ryan would have tested, I think there's about 12 different samples he tested. But right here, you can see something died. So that was clear that there was some phage.
Here you can also see, and it's really hard to see, but there's little speckles all over there. So that's how you do it. I think we're back on track with time.
So, yeah. Okay, I think we're ready to go. Hello, everyone. My name is Sadie, and I did research this summer at King's with the Department of Chemistry and Biology. And I actually worked on two projects simultaneously, which I'll get into right away, but they can both be defined as kind of looking for a needle in a haystack.
So there's two problems of chemistry. We have quantification and identification. So these are pretty important components of research, but it can...
You can work with one of them individually or together, and my projects kind of touch on both of them. My first project deals with quantification. So something we already know is that chronic stress negatively affects the welfare and fitness and reproduction of animals. So what this project aims to examine is, with increased urbanization, how does this affect and does it increase this chronic or long-term stress in animals? So how we want to look at this is we...
extracted and quantified corticosterone, which is a stress hormone, from feather samples in European blackbirds. And for the sake of this experiment, we didn't use the blackbird samples right away because we need to perfect an accurate method before we can move on to those samples, so we used chicken feathers. So just to go over our method really quickly, We start with the feather and then we powderize it and this is important for increasing the surface area for the next step which is extraction and this is when we extract the corticosterone hormone out of the feather sample and then we go through solid phase extraction, which is a purification step And then a really really important step is the derivatization So essentially what we're doing is we're just adding two positive charges onto the hormone and this is really important for increasing the sensitivity in our mass spectrometry analysis via LC-MS-MS. So for our results, we were able to see corticosterone in all of our samples, so this is really good that we were able to develop a method that's sensitive enough to find the hormone in such a small sample size.
And in our chicken feather samples, we saw doubly labeled corticosterone, which is great, this is exactly what we wanted. However, in our pure corticosterone standard that we prepared, we saw singly and doubly labeled corticosterone, which isn't ideal, so in the future we want to optimize our derivatization procedure so we only see that doubly labeled corticosterone. And as well, in the future of this project, we want to get more reproducible results because we're working with such small sample sizes that can be a challenge.
Now jumping to my next project, this deals with identification and is dealing with biofilms. So biofilms are a survival mechanism that some bacteria utilize, and so they might grow biofilms as a defense mechanism, as metabolic cooperation, communication, or a variety of other reasons. So this can be a concern because once a biofilm is produced, this bacteria will be more resistant to sanitation or cleaning. So this can be a problem in something like food processing.
where you don't want your bacteria to be resistant to sanitation. So with our collaborators at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, they discovered four gram-negative bacterial strains that actually prevent biofilm formation in some strains of E. coli and salmonella, which we all know is dangerous, and especially in your food.
So what we are doing is we are trying to identify and identify these compounds. So this is just a really quick methodology. We start with our cell-free supernatant, which is a complex mixture of compounds from the samples, and then we want to start pulling apart these compounds to try to isolate which one might be active for anti-biofilm. And so we do this via liquid-liquid extraction with various organic solvents. So we're separating our organics from our aqueous, and then once we have those separated, we take out the organic solvent and re-dissolve it in water and then perform our bioassay to see where the activity lies.
And so this is some of our results from, this is a thin layer chromatography plate. And essentially if you just look at all these little spots, those represent compounds that are present in the organic layer. And so that's good results because we can see that there are compounds there and that they are different from each other. And for... where this project kind of ended up at the end of the summer, we did successfully separate all the samples and they're currently doing their antibiofilm assay testing.
And once we know where the activity is, then we'll be able to do additional purification steps such as flash chromatography or HPLC. And then we will identify and characterize the compounds with ALA, LC and SMS. And so I'd just like to acknowledge some key people, Dr. Mark Vischer for her supervision and support on this project.
As well as Randy and Bella from the Mass Spectrometry Facility at the U of A, as well as our collaborators in Lacombe and of course NSERC and King's University for funding. Thank you very much. Is the double derivatization problem with the corticosteroids, is that simply adjusting the ratios of the derivatizing agent and your corticosteroids? I think that is what we're pursuing and trying. I think it's more just a ratio issue because you will need so much more of your derivatizing agent because you'll need two for each molecule of corticosterone.
And we don't really know how many molecules are in our sample because we haven't quantified them yet. So when we prepared our standards, we're just buying that corticosterone from the store and then preparing dilutions. So we're just figuring out what dilution is best. So through the summer, we tried two dilutions.
And so I think that would be the next step is to continuously dilute it. Thank you. Yeah, so once we powderize the feather, we extract it for eight hours in methanol.
So corticosterone is soluble in methanol, so that pretty simply just shakes around and then it comes out. And it won't be exclusively the hormone, it'll be a bunch of other hormones and other molecules. So that's why we want to purify a little bit with our SPE later on, but with methanol.
Thanks. Hello everyone. Hello, my name is Don McPhyfer and today I'm presenting my summer research on quantifying trace element localization in bone using LA-ICMS. I work with Dr. Kastavanshi on this topic. Okay, so what is LAICPMS?
It is laser-relation inductively coupled plausible mass spectrometry. It's a technique to use on solid-base samples. It starts a nice balance between having very low detection limits for trace analysis of elements so that we can see very elements of particular isotopes that are very small in quantity and allows us to get decent resolution so we can see very heterogeneous samples very clearly for detecting and localizing our concentrations throughout our sample you might be able to guess from my work i'm specifically going to talking about bones, which are very important because across different disciplines due to their ability to deposit trace elements and heavy metals throughout the skeleton, playing a role a lot in our health and through other archaeological studies. So I'd like to first introduce my first project, which was the quantification of tungsten in bone. This was a toxicological study, specifically surrounding tungsten, which is a heavy metal that is typically found in trace amounts in the human body, and like most metals, deposits itself in bones.
The reason for this is tungsten was recently found to be a very important metal in the human body. The relatively, a relative health risk in the last few years, reintroducing the need to analyze tungsten and see how it interacts with our body and that all begins with our bones. So for the laser ablation ICP-MS.
We then take cross sections, these are mouse bones that we each expose to different regimens of tungsten in order to understand how different exposure conditions correlates to different... accumulations within bone. So we took cross-sections and laser ablated across the bone surface in order to then map out exactly where our tungsten concentrations are and begin to make observations on how this correlates to different health factors. So for our results we actually found in cases of exposure concentration being how much tungsten an individual is particularly Presented to originally, as you might imagine, the higher concentration of tungsten you come across will result in a higher degree of tungsten found accumulating within your bones with a certain diminishing returns as it gets to the higher concentration.
but in terms of exposure and duration, it was found that as regimens of tungsten extended themselves across longer periods of time, the amount of tungsten that was found found accumulated within bone remained relatively steady across all line frames. And with that, I will move on to my second project, which was the quantification of lead in bone. Unlike my previous one, this was in archaeometry, or a subdivision of archaeology. We were then working on human bones for this project. And we're specifically looking for lead, because lead found in bones naturally would indicate lead poisoning, which is a very hot topic throughout history and archaeological means.
Like before, we used laser fleshing this time at a smaller resolution. We're going to see our bone microstructures throughout the sample. This ability of LAI to be allowed us to map out the individual bone microstructures and also begin to realize or begin to observe how environmental impacts in our bones from the burial site post-death may translate to different trace element concentrations throughout the bone sample.
This project is still ongoing as we are looking throughout the bone series here, looking at how different bone microstructures structures refer to different bone concentrations and organic compositions but so far it has been rather promising. With that I'd like to thank Dr. Cassidy-Vanchi for her time. ...and supervision helping me out with these projects. I'd like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding and support. I'd like to thank the King's University for all their time and assistance.
And I'd like to thank Dr. Dan Liu of the University of Alberta for her help with the laser equation. Thank you. Hi, my name is Ethan Nanga and my project is on studying the interactions of vanadium and nephropenic acid using EPR and UV-Base spectrometry. So, firstly, we'll go over some of the background information and then...
go over like how to perform the experiments and then we'll go over some of the results the electro-pairing and resonance results the EPR and UV-based results as well so firstly some back background on the project. So the Athabasca oil sands region is one of the largest oil deposits in the world and a byproduct of the process to extract oil is the oil sands process water. And this water cannot be disposed of and it has to be stored in what are known as tailings ponds, which are these man-made ponds where they store the water.
Now these are known to have very many toxic constituents such as as vanadium and ethyl acids and they contribute heavily to the toxicity, which is what I'll talk about next. So vanadium is a transition metal and it's found in fairly high concentrations in the oil sands. The two most obvious sources of vanadium are the oil sands, which are found in the oil sands.
The oil sands are found in the oil sands, which are the most common oil sands. The oil sands are found in the Oxidation states are important and the two most environmentally relevant concentrations are vanadium-4 and vanadium-5, where vanadium-5 is more toxic of the two. And in aqueous...
neutral conditions like in the tailings ponds, the B4 will gradually oxidize into B5 naturally. As you see here, picture the Venatium 4 is like a deep blue color and the Venatium 5 is a bright yellow color. Now the other toxic consumant is nephenic acids and they are like the most, the most, the most, like the primary toxic consumant in the tenx bonds.
So a nephenic acid is actually a complex mixture of nephenic, of carboxylic acids ranging from about 100 to 700 Daltons. So for this experiment we used some model nephenic acids right here. So this is what they're, I think it's.
complex mixture of these so we use PDA, HA, and CPA as our models. So for the method to prepare samples I would first made a control sample here with just the vanadium without any anaphylactic acid in it dissolved in water and then made three samples which each one of each of the model ethnic acids mixed with the venetian here. Here venetian is a B4 species called Banadil B02 plus and these samples were either taken ran EPR on them or UD bits.
So for EPR, the EPR can show the electronic environment of an atom. So here this spectrum here is a vanadium 4 signal and this is just standard signals this is what you'd expect a vanadium signal to be and isotropic signal and then over here is this is the vanadium mixed with the nephelic acids and as you can see it's like an anacid principle so it's quite different so this this suggests that there is a different electronic environment which possibly leads to some vanadium-nephelic acid complexes forming Yeah, I have a lot more information on this because I find EPR pretty cool, so if you come to my post you can want to know more about this post, this kind of stuff. As for the UV-Vis results, so when we did, we made the...
When we did the UV-Vis, we took the absorbances of the V5 and V4 of each of the solutions and ran them over time. So we take a measurement once every three days for about roughly ten days. And as you can see here, just the B4 control with non-authentic acids, the min-84 almost immediately goes to zero, whereas the min-85 immediately shoots up to its maximum.
Whereas with the authentic acids, the B4 takes longer to go away. A visual representation of this is here. These are the four samples with the control on the side. And as you can see, the samples with the...
the ethanic acids stay darker for longer compared to the control, but eventually they do all turn yellow after about a week. So in summary we can conclude that vanadium forms complexes with the Na's in solution at these pHs and that the ethanic acids allow the vanadium port to... take longer to oxidize into vanadium-5.
I would like to thank the King's University for the space and the ability of hiring me. And I'd like to thank NSERC for the funding. And I would like to thank my lab group for working on this project and helping me out.
And I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Candy Vanashee, for all the support. My name is Erin and I've worked with Dr. Cassie VanRasche on investigating metal math in a coordination with orbit-trap mass spectrometry. Just a quick outline, I'm going to do an introduction first of the athmoscopal sense region, then what aesthetic acids are, and then I'm going to go into my research question, and then I'm going to talk a bit about what mass spec is, our results, and then our conclusion of future work. So just to reiterate, as you've heard previously, the Athabasca oil sands region is one of the largest oil deposits in the world.
Oil extraction processes produce oil-sense process water, which is stored in tannins ponds. And tannins ponds are known to be toxic due to the presence of euthenic acids and the various minerals that are within it. So euthenic acids are a class of diverse organic carboxylic acids and can range in structures from aromatic, aliphatic, cyclic, or acyclic. So these NAs on the right are just a small subset of the possible. of methenic acids that we can find.
But as most of you guys have probably noticed, they all have one thing in common, they all contain a carboxylic acid. So the methenic acids that are found in tannate ponds are very complex, so we focused on a simpler monomethenic acid, and we used 4-phenylbutyric acid, which we refer to as PVA for the rest of this presentation. So our primary objective this summer was to answer the question what metals does the gas coordinate to. So to answer this we came up with two research aims.
The first was to develop an effective R code to be able to visualize R over-trapped mass spectrometry data and the second was to determine if there is metal math in the coordination from that. But first let's now talk about the method that we used to obtain our data which was mass spectrometry. So it is a great technique for solving our problem because it gives us precise m over z values that we can then correlate into a molecular structure. Now into our results. So this summer we focused on analyzing data from three metals, so vanadium, zinc, and copper, and then our model of authentic acid PVA.
So first here is our PVA control, which has its prominent peak at 1.4 to 7. corresponding to the molecular weight of PBA, which is good. And then, now let's look at what happens when we add zinc and PBA together. So we can see here that we have that PBA peak at 147 still present, but it's at a lower end. intensity so that's in green but what is interesting is we now begin to see a characteristic triplet feature that is observed at 227, 244, 268, and 391 M over Z which is due to the abundances of zinc 64, 66, and 68 isotopes which clearly demonstrate the formation of zinc complexes so the peak at 227 in pink or is The orange purple is consistent with zinc in a PBA complex and then the pink that's in blue is zinc, PBA, and then an NH3 attached to it which is just due to the base we used when adjusting the pH. So before we see what happens when vanadium and PVA are added together, let's first look at the vanadium control. So vanadium, again, has four different oxidation states, and we're mainly focused on the B4 and B5.
So the peak here at 280 is assigned the chemical formula of B3O8, a polymeric B5 species. And then this peak at 163 is residual PVA. So when zinc, er, sorry, when vanadium and PBA are added together, we see that that B3O8 peak is now absent from the spectrum. And we additionally see a very small signal at 263 that is a sign of chemical formula of C10H12O5B, indicative of a PBA-coordinated vanadium species.
Now on to our copper and PVA results. So the addition of copper to PVA leads to the formation of new peaks at 226 and 267 that are not seen in our control spectra. So the one at 226 highlighted in blue can be attributed to the copper 64 isotope in the PVA compound.
So just our conclusions, so we see interactions and possible coordination between all three metals and our monolens and our gasset. But in the future we want to add a portion to the code that allows us to, or for the molecular formulas of our... important peaks to be shown and we also want to expand our studies to include more metals and more model and authentic acids.
So I would just like to thank Environment and Climate Change Canada and NSERC for their funding. the King's University for allowing us to conduct research, Dr. Starkey and Cindy Slupski for their expertise and help, and then Dr. Cassidy Van der Schiet for allowing me to conduct this research, and then the rest of my lab group. Hi everyone, we're the King's Center for Visualization and Science. There's one more, but they'll be doing their presentations separately. So the next four people you see up here talking will all be KCBS.
So a bit of an introduction. introduction as to what KCBS is. We were founded in 2005 by Dr. Peter Mahaffey and Dr. Martin, who is retired now. And we create online peer-reviewed interactive learning tools. So we weren't in a lab all summer, we were in a computer lab, working at computers, doing research, and creating learning tools.
that you will encounter in this year and other years in your degree. Annually, 500,000 people come to our website and utilize our tools from all over the world and all of our tools are created by a team of undergraduate students like what you see up here today that come in every summer to work on our resources. So I'll hand this off to Sarah.
So hi, my name is Sarah. I'm a fourth year chemistry major and I've had the pleasure of working at KCBS for the past three summers now. Today I'm going to tell you about an interactive learning tool we developed this summer to help students explore the concept of creative foreseeing.
So, to begin... We know that all of our energy comes from the Sun about one third of that energy is reflected back into space By white and bright surfaces. This is a concept called albedo, which you might have heard of before But then two-thirds of that energy gets absorbed into Earth and then it's re-emitted as iron energy or heat.
So there's this balance of incoming and outgoing energy, and this balance is crucial for sustaining life on Earth. So that's where radiative forcing comes in. Radiative forcing is the change in this incoming and outgoing energy balance since 1750, so that's like pre-industrial times. So we've all heard of climate change, of course.
Radiative forcing is what is driving climate change. This is what's causing these major temperature changes we are seeing. So this is the KCS learning tool that we developed this summer. It was largely based off the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change annual reports. So this was a peer review resource that went through a lot of interim review as well as external scientists, chemists and educators all provided feedback on it as well.
A couple of the cool features that it includes is an analyze the change over time feature. So we have this timeline on the bottom that goes again since our timestamp is 1750. You can see how not only the net value of radiated forcing, but the contributions from some of the major substances has changed over time. So this is very important in really understanding how much humans have impacted the climate. We also have, if you click on the information buttons by each of the substances, you can learn about where they come from, how they impact the environment, and what are some solutions. As well, we have created some scenarios.
So all the sliders out there are interactive. So we'll say. say move the carbon dioxide slider to a certain value see how it impacts the net value and then reflect on what could this mean for our climate another thing that we wanted to incorporate into this learning resources was case study because case studies are super important tools to really help students engage with the material and apply what they learn in the classroom to these real-world problems so the one that we included was about salt and bunker fuel.
So the issue is that port cities have a higher percentage of pollution-related diseases and deaths, and this is in large part due to the high sulfur content in ships. In the fuel used by ships. So ships are coming in and out of these port cities. They are burning fuel that has a high content of sulfur and this in turn creates sulfate aerosol.
So we saw in the picture here all these clouds. They have a lot of aerosol. They're a big component of that that increases their reflectivity but they're also really harmful pollutants for human health.
So the International Maritime Organization wants to cut back sulfur in fuels to help human health. So that's all good and they have made quite a some good progress with that, but as we know there's always some unintended consequences. So if I return to our alphabet, we see here the net value we are currently at in 2023 is 2.9 watts per meter squared. So that's kind of like an abstract value, what does that really mean?
If you imagine three 1 watt light bulbs on every square meter of our earth giving off heat, that's essentially what us humans have done to change the energy balance of our planet since 1750. So that's quite significant. But if you look at each of the values for the substances, all those red bars, you actually may notice that they add up to more than 2.9. So we have aerosols, which a large part are the sulfate aerosols, that combat a lot of this warming. So it's super important.
But as we said, IMO wants to decrease sulfate aerosols for good reason, because it's impacting human health. But let's see what happens when you do that. The value increases drastically.
This is almost adding another light bulb. to every square meter of our planet. So obviously it can have many effects on temperature and our climate.
So what's the solution? Well, in the case study, we never really come to a clear solution because there is no clear solution. Like, as we said, aerosols are super important in combating that warming, and our greenhouse gas concentrations are only increasing.
So you'd think we need to increase aerosol concentrations, but that's not really ethically right, because they're super harmful to human health. So you may ask why do we even bother posing this to students because it's just such a complex issue. But this type of systems thinking is super important. You map out the issue, you look at its sources, its impacts, where it ends up, and this really helps raise raise the next generation of chemists to be systems thinkers, look at every side of the issue, and make the most educated decisions. Because the environmental problems that we are facing are not simple.
They will complicate it like this. But some of these in-depth case studies can help address this. Next up, we hope to develop even more case studies and more learning tools for educators. We're also working on publishing a manuscript about this resource in the Journal of Chemical Education and are going to be conducting research with first-year undergraduate and high school students.
Thank you and all the best for your future grads! Hello everyone, my name is Riley and I'm a second year chem major. We had the pleasure of working at KCBS over the summer on the Guidance Principles of Responsible Chemistry project. This is a project of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, which is kind of the body that represents and sets standards for chemistry around the globe.
Anyone studying chemistry will soon learn of or has heard of the 12 principles of green chemistry. These are very important principles that really speak to the responsibility chemists have. However, IU PAC has been concerned that there's much more to the responsible practice of chemistry than these 12 principles offer. So they've been working hard for the past two years to develop a set of eight guiding principles that really speak to the responsible practice of chemistry that they would want any chemist to know about. This is an initiative of the Committee on...
Ethics, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, which is a relatively new committee but it is composed of chemistry leaders from around the globe, including our own Dr. Mahaffey, and the goal of this project is to really communicate and encourage transparency, ethics, responsibility and sustainability within the field of chemistry. So what would be these eight guiding principles that would really speak to the responsibility chemists have to offer? And that would be responsible innovation, safety, safety, security and sustainability, ethical behaviour, inclusivity, equity and belonging, communication and collaboration, equitable access, integrity and accuracy, and convergence across disciplines.
But what did KCVS contribute to this project? Well, KCVS designed and developed each of those icons and taglines that I just showed you, but we also developed and designed an infographic and a website as well to aid in the communication of these principles to students such as yourselves. I also generated a main project icon that will kind of serve as the overarching symbol for this IUPAC project that really shows the interconnectivity of the principles through the puzzle piece design and the sustainability and responsibility chemists have to the planet and its inhabitants.
This is a screen capture from the website that KCVS developed for IU-PAC and you can click down on each of the drop downs to reveal the principle and a two to three sentence elaboration that really supports the principle. Each member of the committee is also working on an expansion text that really will support that principle and allow students to engage more with the principle. Each expansion text is divided into sections such as examples, guiding future action, and questions to guide discussion. These sections really encourage an active learning approach that KCVS did propose to the committee because active learning has really been shown to improve student learning outcomes.
KCVS also wrote the examples and guiding future action expansion text for the Responsible Innovation Principle. And I would just like to acknowledge my team and King's, IUPAC, and NSERC. And then I'll pass it over to Ava.
Hi everyone, I'm Ava. I'm a fourth year interdisciplinary sciences student at Kemenbaya. When KCBS sat down at the beginning of this summer, we decided that hydrogen was something we really wanted to talk about.
the news a lot lately when we're talking about energy transition and moving away from fossil fuels but we we came across a problem fairly quickly how do you teach students and the general public about something that's so intertwined in politics chemistry and climate change it's so complicated but of course you make a game out of it so why did we think hydrogen was so important there's a number of different current and future uses that we really wanted to highlight the first is A big part of this is making ammonia for fertilizer, which you'll learn about later in your course if you're into chemistry. And also for petroleum refining. This is obviously particularly important for Alberta since we have such a big oil and gas industry, but hydrogen is used in the upgrading process for gas.
And some future uses is that hydrogen is being looked at as being a molecular energy carrier, like I said to talk about the energy transition and moving away from greenhouse gases, as well as being used in fuel cells, which you may have heard about, where we can take hydrogen and oxygen and react them together to create just water as a byproduct and utilizable energy. So here are the colours of hydrogen, and I'd get my wrists slapped if I didn't make it abundantly clear to you all that hydrogen is always colourless. This is purely a classification system to help people understand the processes and bits that go into creating hydrogen.
So each of these five colours we've identified as being main players of hydrogen. There are other colours, but we felt that they were small and didn't deserve the highlight. So black and brown is hydrogen that's produced via the gasification of coal. Grey hydrogen is produced with steam methane performing, which is a reaction that involves taking steam and methane together and produces a lot of carbon dioxide.
So blue hydrogen uses that stained steam methane forming reaction but captures the hydrogen emissions and then that carbon can either be stored or utilized. Pink hydrogen involves the electrolysis of water, which is taking a water molecule and splitting it up into its parts of hydrogen and oxygen and then we can use that hydrogen. And with pink hydrogen, that electrolysis is powered via nuclear energy. Green hydrogen is that same splitting of water molecules, but it's powered by renewable energy, so solar, wind, geothermal. those types of energy sources.
What's important to highlight here with these colors is that while we talk about hydrogen as being a sustainable alternative in the energy transition, black, brown, grey and blue still rely heavily on fossil fuels with coal and methane. So in Alberta, we produce, the vast majority amount of our hydrogen that we produce is grey. But we talk about having systems in place to be able to transition to blue in the near future. So that's where we are at in our current sphere. And why is it important to talk about this classification system?
If hydrogen is great and sustainable, why do we need to have a classification system? But that's where this comes in. So on this chart you see on the axis, this is carbon intensity per kilogram of hydrogen we make.
So black and brown hydrogen is way up there. It's producing a lot of carbon dioxide every kilogram of hydrogen it makes. And then the rest kind of falls in here.
We see grey is a lot lower, blue is even lower than that because it's capturing the carbon. We see some other colours that we haven't mentioned yet. And then we come to green, which is substantially lower carbon dioxide emissions. So this is an important concept to talk about different ways that we're getting hydrogen, even if we're using all hydrogen for the same purposes.
This is what the user interface of our game looks like. We designed it in a software called Unity, which the person coming after me will talk a little bit more about. And how it works is that students or whoever's using it can go about and create a factory and they'll get money and add more elements to their factory.
As they add more elements to their factory, they'll unlock new colours of hydrogen and be told about that colour of hydrogen as well as the cost attributed to that colour of hydrogen and the greenhouse gas emissions, which is then reflected in those top two bars. We have the money bar and the greenhouse gas bar. So it really gets people thinking about this balance between wanting to make money with your factory and also needing to be conscious about the greenhouse gas emissions as you progress through.
Some of the learning outcomes that will be tackled with this game is that students will be able to categorize hydrogen into its colours based on fuel sources and production process like we did. They'll be able to define the colours of hydrogen, particularly those five colours of hydrogen that I had on my slide. And they'll be able to rank hydrogen colours based on greenhouse gas emissions as well as costs.
So the game is in a prototype phase right now on Unity, but we're looking forward to being able to publish it next summer with a little bit more work. I'd like to thank the KCBS team, particularly Dr. Jeff Snyder, who's here somewhere, for suggesting Unity and making a game of this. And the King's University and Dr. Mahaffey. Just to point out a lot of what you heard in this is going to come back in our subsequent chapters.
We're going to be talking about colors of hydrogen, we're going to be talking about radiative forcing, we're going to be using these applets. So if it seems a little bit much right now you're going to have lots of time this year to really unpack those things. So about 30 seconds if there's a question.
Now, I'll go switch. Okay guys, I'm Jenny and I'm a second year cognitive science student. Today I'm going to tell you more about what my role is at KCBS.
Which, I mean, I don't know if you've heard about it or not. And then I will tell you more about the projects that have already been talked about before. I'll tell you the programming side of this project, which will give you a little break from those like, chem and bio boring things.
I hope you don't find it boring. I mean, if you find it, you can join us, computer science. And so I will tell you how did I program them, and then why did I choose to program it that way.
So that's the game. So this is my first time working at KCBS. My role was to maintain the website and everything.
I added the learning tools and also created some new learning tools. The first learning tool that I put out was ready-to-use parsing. For this learning tool, I used HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as the coding languages. And these are the most commonly used languages to create a website.
And that's why I already kind of knew about them because I learned it through a course, which you can take if you guys want. So HTML is a language that lets you add text content on the website. CSS is a language that lets you add text to a website.
that lets you add layout and design on the website so that your website is not boring, but it's actually kind of exciting and that you can attract more people through visually. Then JavaScript lets you add interactivity on the website so the user, again, is not just only looking at your website, but is also interacting with the website. The reason to choose this language is was that this learning tool was heavily text-based, so which was easily added or achieved through the HTML language. And then our chemist, my other team members, wanted me to do something that can communicate the change over time of the radiative forces. So for that, I chose to do it through a D3 integer, which is a JavaScript library.
So the red bars that you see, the yellow bars, the timeline slider, they all are dragables. And all this interactive feature was added through D3, a JavaScript library. The other project that I programmed this year is IUPAC's Guided Principle of Responsible Chemistry.
For this, we... we chose a different way and we chose to do it through WordPress. WordPress is a platform that lets you create a website very easily and you don't even need any coding skills for that.
So you can take a look into it if you don't like coding but still want to create websites. This is something that I didn't know this summer. I did not know what WordPress was. But thanks to KCBS, I got to learn WordPress. The reason to use WordPress, as I said, you don't really need any coding skills for it so that you can easily also create it and then not just not just create, but it's easy to edit and manage the content on the website.
And as we have talked before, there are a lot of people who are completely working on this project from all over the world and might not everybody know about what coding is. So for them it is really easy to walk through this website and also edit and manage all the expanded text that they have worked on. The last project, which is my favorite kind of, is the gamified version of learning tools.
I really love creating this, like, after it was so fun. And we used to create this effort, we used Unity, which is a game engine. Thanks to Jeff Snyder, I don't think he's here.
Hi! So thanks to him for telling us what Unity is. Unity uses C sharp as a coding language and using C sharp you can add interactivity to the game so that you can make it playable.
And this is also something that I learned this summer and I love it. I love it so much that I'm so excited to create more games. The main reason to use this was that it's a game engine so it's literally designed to create games. So this is how Unity looks like and then it's very easy to add all the elements on the scene and then it's also easy to make those elements so that it's literally a game.
I don't have a demo over here but if I could I would have so much fun to play a game right here. That's all I have for you guys today. It was a great experience working at KCU with such a fantastic team. I also got to learn so much new things.
I'm grateful for this opportunity, grateful to the University and Dr. Mahafi. Thank you so much guys. So hello everybody, my name is Mason Dunn.
This summer I worked with Dr. Michael Jansen to integrate artificial intelligence into the animal image classification workflow. So to be more clear about animal images and camera tracks, it's nice to understand the problem. When we look at these wildlife trail cameras, oftentimes we're looking at motion trigger captures.
So when an animal walks by in the frame, we can get a relative image. factors such as wind blowing or hikers walking through, we find a large subsection of the total images aren't actually overly relevant to our work and so Event Finder is an application and workflow that aims to streamline this process. So here we see three stages and the idea here is that we start with our images and we'll end up with a ...with the actual application where the user can go through manually tagged images. Firstly, we have camera transfer stage. This is an overly important for this research because it's just moving images around from the camera on the computer.
But, event finder is where we're going to... get to the pre-processing stage and that's where things get interesting. So previously we used, basically it's a background subtraction algorithm that builds a background based on sequences of images and then studies the foreground movement of pixels.
So we can see a significant movement of bundles of pixels between frames. It's some indication that this image needs more evaluation and it's tagged as such. Event tagger is actually the application where we're going to sit down and move through each image and go ahead and classify them based on the animal.
Now if we can use the Stage 2's Event Finder to filter out non-event images, this process can be sped up. So Event Finder AI is the new module we've implemented into Stage 2, and this is a new option for pre-processing images. Using a neural network, which is a type of artificial intelligence from Microsoft, we need a mega detector, and unlike the binary classification of background subtraction, which just looks at yes or no to events, it actually has four unique classifications. So firstly, of course, we have animals. Humans, vehicles, and non-events.
So this extra flexibility will give you more permutations in EventTagger because you can kind of pick and choose whatever kind of patterns of images you want. So maybe you only want to look at images of ants. Maybe you only want to look at humans. So you can pick and choose, and so of course that is going to allow you to cut out more images and speed up the process. Now since both these modules exist in the same stage, we can run them up against each other and look at their performances.
So first off, we're going to look at run time. We're going to notice that event finder AI comes in just a bit over half of the runtime background subtraction, so already a significant time save. This is mainly because we're pushing the computation on the graphics card, which is an option for artificial intelligence and neural networks, so that's obviously a huge advantage. We can now look at our false positive and false negative testing. So this is done in relation to animal identification.
So false positive drops by 70% in this test. for the AI. This means that the algorithm isn't mistaking images for animals when they aren't actually and so this is a huge time saving the event tagger process. We can also look at pulse negatives which remains low for both metrics.
This is essentially when an algorithm misses an animal and this is very troubling for most kinds of research so it's nice to see these metrics very low. We also have two actors to test that are a bit different. Firstly, we have the detection accuracy test, and this is aiming just to look at the events in images.
So we'll notice 85 and 93, so we've only seen an 8% increase here, which is still really solid. Background subtraction is very good at identifying events. Unfortunately, it just can't distinct them as well, and that's why we see the high false positive.
The classification test is exclusive for the AI, and that's because, again, we have those four classification options, being animal, human, vehicle, and non-events. And Event Finder AI comes in at a 90.2% accuracy there. So that was the goal primarily of the summer, is to get a detection network inside the workflow of Event Finder. But then we started to raise questions about how can we actually further this and make it even better. And the answer was a custom trained network that can actually identify species and images.
So we can look at albertan ungulates, maybe moose, deer, elk. And this is obviously going to even further ecologists'ability to tag images, because if you're only doing research on deer, you don't necessarily want to see elk, and so on and so forth. This is very data intensive and requires a lot of computation.
So all in all, we did have this process slow down a bit as we were pushing on the sea. but it showed great promise and is going to be absolutely a point of emphasis moving forward. But overall, when we look at the workflow with the Event Finder AI, it seems that its increased speed as well as accuracy are two really important pieces, especially when you're looking at the time consuming nature of tagging images manually. The only real trade-off here is a slightly more complex setup and hardware, but when you look at the options and classifications, such as, like I mentioned, the four different classes, it is definitely worth it.
So, thank you, and I guess if there's any questions, we can do that. Otherwise, I'll leave. Are there any questions for Mason?
I'll take one. So the AI had 5.7% false positive rate. The original algorithm was 74. What's the human?
How often do we mess up? That's a good question. Yeah. I think what I found interesting about that question is sometimes when I was doing the human tagging as it relates to the AI, I was getting worried because sometimes I would be missing animals that are actually really far in the background.
And so I'm like, oh, that's wrong. Instead, there's an animal there. than there really is.
So I think that would be an interesting thing to test on a larger scale, because I frankly believe that the network is very good at predicting things. A large part of the loss that we see with the AI is its inability to distinguish between vehicles and humans. That's a huge part of the loss.
So it's probably more accurate than those numbers indicate. But I think human accuracy is actually, when you consider fatigue going over 20,000 images, we're probably approaching a point where networks like this are going to be able to probably. So that's kind of an interesting point for sure. Thank you. So I sit here and I am amazed at the types of things that you students have accomplished.
It is remarkable to see what you've learned and what you can do and where you're going to go with this. So Kim 200, if you were sitting there thinking, this is intense, this is doable, and this is wonderful. So let's give one more round of applause to our presenters.