Moving forward!

 

View of Dana Point Harbor, just North of our sampling site.

The team has been quiet since the ISME conference, but that does not mean we have been idle...on the contrary! We have been teaching and dealing with a number of other things that popped up as fall started. However the afterglow of the ISME conference, which validated our research and inspired new ideas has stayed with us. We finally met last Tuesday for a strategic meeting, and made a few decisions as to how to move forward.

We'll do a few other experiments from the material of the last ocean run, specifically some chemical analysis of the plastic and also DNA extraction from the colonies grown on the ChromAgar Vibrio. We will also rerun the bioinformatics analysis again, and hope to start using Geneious soon, thanks to your backing! Other plans involve blueprinting of the cages with some improvements, so we can offer the design to whoever wants to follow our approach. One major goal is to assemble enough data for publication. 

With the long warm summer that we have had in SoCal, seems like we should be fine for another sampling tun in the near future. We decided on a longer time frame, probably up to 2 months and with more time in-between to see if some of the changes we saw towards day 28 were outliers or beginning tendencies. 

In summary, we are excited and looking forward the next stage. We'll keep you posted!