We would have liked to see how cuttlefish degrades over time and how this effects results. There is often stability issues with organic compounds. Finding a solution to this would be great for research in other compounds, not just cuttlefish ink.
Water has a biome that lets bacteria thrive. There is a lot of nutrient potential in water that bacteria love to grow off of. DMSO and Ethanol are good controls because they are neither strong enough to kill bacteria, nor rich enough to grow bacteria. The amount of ethanol we used was not a high enough concentration to actually kill salmonella, so it was a great control.
Matthew Beck 1161
If cuttlefish ink is toxic to tumors, is it currently used in medicine? You mentioned this research is newer, but what other sort of research is being done with cuttlefish ink?
There are some clinical trials related to the development of cuttlefish ink. As far as I know of, there are no FDA approved medicines based on cuttlefish ink right now. A lot of scientists particularly in Eastern Asia are looking into marine life based antibiotics for various treatments. The most popular research for cuttlefish ink right now is in treating tumor cells and MRSA.
If you had more time to continue testing the ink, what would have been your next step?
We would have liked to see how cuttlefish degrades over time and how this effects results. There is often stability issues with organic compounds. Finding a solution to this would be great for research in other compounds, not just cuttlefish ink.
Why did you choose ethanol to use for your negative control – why not something like water?
Water has a biome that lets bacteria thrive. There is a lot of nutrient potential in water that bacteria love to grow off of. DMSO and Ethanol are good controls because they are neither strong enough to kill bacteria, nor rich enough to grow bacteria. The amount of ethanol we used was not a high enough concentration to actually kill salmonella, so it was a great control.
Matthew Beck 1161
If cuttlefish ink is toxic to tumors, is it currently used in medicine? You mentioned this research is newer, but what other sort of research is being done with cuttlefish ink?
There are some clinical trials related to the development of cuttlefish ink. As far as I know of, there are no FDA approved medicines based on cuttlefish ink right now. A lot of scientists particularly in Eastern Asia are looking into marine life based antibiotics for various treatments. The most popular research for cuttlefish ink right now is in treating tumor cells and MRSA.