Still working on it!
As the spawning season has come to a close, we have encountered quite a few more speed bumps than expected. Of course, science is never easy, and we are doing our best to work through these bumps.
Our first bump in the road was discovering that one of our peptide hormones was not bioactive. This means that this hormone was not turned on, we had to alter the peptide in order to get it to turn on and be ready for use in the 'opihi. After working with some post-translational modifications (folding the peptide hormone to make it bioactive) we were able to get it ready for further testing.
The next bump in the road was a COVID outbreak within the lab. We had a few members of our team come down with COVID and to minimize any further spread, we halted all activities for a week. This allows everyone to get tested and ensures that the cases were isolated to those lab members. Health and safety are especially important in my lab and although it may cause some stress having to stop research in its tracks for a little, it is better to miss one week, than longer because of a prolonged illness.
Now that everything is back on track, we are moving forward with further testing on our peptide hormones focusing on toxicity. If we can determine the threshold that the 'opihi can withstand, if there is one, before the spawning season starts again, we can eliminate a lot of lost individuals and save time for us.
Another thing that we are working on is some small little side research projects. These projects will help us learn even more about 'opihi and provide more information for the community.
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