nrjank

This was an exciting topic with interesting potential, wondering how it finished out?

Realize it's been a few years, but just circling back around to this. Well done on completing the study and your MS. As you said in the results, running a study and getting null results is still part of science. Curious if you're still pursuing research in this direction, or if you could summarize 'paths forward' for this kind of research (lifted from your thesis is fine)

Just circled back to this project, and I realize it's quite overdue but great job at iGEM. Curious if anything further has occurred with this project/technology beyond what's listed on the iGEM Wiki.

Wondering what the status of this project is, as quite a bit has occurred since it was funded in early 2020. Hope all is well.

Would it be possible to share some of your planned methodology? The reference to the Rey-Barroso Sensors paper is useful in grounding the plausibility of the approach (in fact, it seems to already answer your project title with a 'Yes'), but it's not clear what is going to be involved with your expansion beyond that work. They highlighted difficulties in InGaAs detector resolution and total field of view. Their handheld device is fairly clearly described. How will yours differ? Is the focus of this work on expanding the machine learning algorithms or making a more useful hand scanner? How will your algorithms build upon the conclusions in that paper on the state of the art?

An interesting study. With all of the back and forth trying to ascertain causality related to certain bee population declines (pesticides, pollution, pathogens, parasites, wild versus cultivated bee colony susceptibility, etc.), it seems there has been quite a bit of uncontrolled variability in many of the studies done. It will be interesting to see the experiment methodology and what bounds that may place on the scope of potential conclusions. Things like: will the dosage be field-relevant to levels at time of application or for likely remaining residues at forage times? Will dosage try to emulate single exposure or lifetime-accumulated exposure estimates? How will diet be controlled and what will it consist of? How can/will population parasite burden be controlled and/or ascertained pre- and post-experiment? Some controls may run into cost limits based on this funding request, so understanding and clearly stating what can't be pinned down in this study is going to be very important.

I'm very interested in this project for several reasons. At first, from the title, my skeptical defenses went up as I expected to an experiment centered around 'all natural product' buzzword pseudoscience. Instead I see a promising experiment, from a high schooler no less, delving into the complex and fascinating science of pharmacognosy. We live in a world where people seem to focus on some fictitious separation of the natural world and science, with baseless moralizing on better or worse. I'm excited to see what you discover, and you've already identified some key points where positive evidence could lead to more robust study and development of improved pharmaceuticals and treatments down the road. Best of luck!

No problem. I assume it would all eventually be laid out in the experimental design section of your thesis, and you have more important things to do than write it twice :)

This is a great project topic. Sleep depravation is an important topic, especially in modern society with pressures pushing so many to low level chronic sleep depravation. I am curious about your variable level choice. The description mentioned other studies, so maybe it's just context I'm missing, but why 4 and 8 hours, and only a single night? Obviously the 8hr is a standard control, but is 4 hrs the right amount to be "sleep depraved"? Would more information be gained from a multilevel variable, say 0, 2, 4, 8 hrs? Maybe additional variable levels would create significance issues with the number of test subjects? Would appreciate some commentary to that effect, and best of luck!