Having meant to write several posts about exciting things that have gone on in the past couple of weeks I am now faced with combining them all, for efficiency’s sake, into another “research update”.

This week I have received an enquiry about analysing pigments and toxins found in the colourful tips of New Zealand giant springtails, Holacanthella. This could be a really cool little piece of analysis if it works. I’m going to have to head out into the Waitakeres to poke some lumps of rotting wood in the hope of finding some of these punk woodlice to play with.

After a visit from Don MacLeod of the NZ Beekeeper’s Association last week I am testing out some more extractions of neonicotinoid pesticides. A new paper was published this week in Environmental Chemistry documenting the occurrence of these pesticides in pollen and honey from hives across the US. The paper was written by Alex Chensheng Lu et al (2015), who kindly shared a copy with me. The paper reports that, during the Summer months, several neonicotinoids were present in pollen at concentrations of several ng/g; concentrations that may be acutely toxic to bees (Laycock et al 2012). The authors discovered measurable concentrations of at least one neonicotinoid pesticide in >70% of honey and pollen samples. I am hoping I can repeat their analysis in New Zealand samples to see if we have a similar issue here.

I have also been developing a method for the quantification of bile acids by LC-MS, which is causing me headaches as certain compounds won’t stay in solution (lithocholic acid, I’m looking at you), some seem to have a very low response in the instrument and others are playing hide-and-seek! The solution, as ever, is a bigger chicken.

I have also been plotting further awesome research plans for the future, submitting an application for a Summer studentship to get someone to look at polysaccharide structures, again with LC-MS. My life seems to revolve around the instrument sometimes but this week has not been all about the liquid phase. I have also been emailing around the results of some test analyses I conducted using methyl chloroformate derivatisation and GC-MS to try and expand the use of this very nice little method within the school. Consequently I found myself preparing samples of mangrove leaf extract, lamb and wagyu beef, fermented mussel liquor and hydrolysed beef protein. I was meant to have a go at some polyamines for another of the PhD students but I forgot their sample. Doh.

Apart from this mass-spectrometry-based fun I may have a student looking to measure total triacylglycerol content and fatty acid profiles of fish oocytes at some point. I’ve also had a really awesome kick-off meeting for my new PhD student, who is going to be studying plant phenology. We are kicking about ideas for the acquisition and installation of a phenocam.

Its been a crazy busy week!

Refs

Chensheng (Alex) Lu, Chi-Hsuan Chang, Lin Tao and Mei Chen (2015). Distributions of neonicotinoid insecticides in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts: a temporal and spatial variation analysis for pollen and honey samples. Environmental Chemistry – http://dx.doi.org/10.1071/EN15064

Laycock I, Lenthall KM, Barratt AT, Cresswell JE (2012). Effects of imidacloprid, a neonicotinoid pesticide, on reproduction in worker bumble bees (Bombus terrestris). Ecotoxicology 21(7):1937-45. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10646-012-0927-y