The adaptive significance and rapid evolutionary dynamics of seminal fluid proteins
Sensory and Behavioural Biology
Reproductive Medicine, Urology
Final Report Abstract
In summary, the project was beset by three main problems: 1) the COVID restrictions still in place at the beginning of the project meant that field sampling was initially postponed; 2) when we did attempt to start field sampling, there were significant administrative barriers in trying to obtain the necessary permissions from the Greek authorities to ensure Nagoya compliance, causing further delays (of several months); and 3) an infection - of an unknown pathogen - spread through our flatworm cultures, meaning that most of the subjects we planned to use in these experiments were in some way compromised (see details below); many cultures were lost completely; and I was eventually forced to abandon the remainder to try to eliminate the (unknown) pathogen when moving the lab from Bielefeld to Rennes to take up a new position. Finally, although I initially hoped to request a further cost-neutral extension to the grant in order to try to conduct further experiments to re-attempt some experiments, this was also complicated by my recent move to France, which unfortunately meant this was not possible because the work could no longer be completed in Germany. The net result is that were are clearly in the frustrating and unfortunate position of having few results to publish at the end of the project period. Whilst it is true that this period was curtailed by the fact I hired a postdoc rather than the PhD student intially envisaged in the proposal, I stand by this decision because the postodoc I hired, Dr. Athina Giannakara, is an extremely experienced Macrostomum researcher and I am quite certain that nobody else would have been in a better position to try to overcome these obstacles. This is also why I eventually also decided to extend Dr. Giannakara’s contract to try to repeat experiments that had earlier failed, using funds we had so far not needed for consumables and downstream analyses. I also remain similarly convinced that the work programme itself was a valid and interesting one, with the problems implementing it being rather logisitical than anything to do with its intrinsic scientific merit. Whilst it is true that some negative results obtained early in the project – particulary for Mlig-pro63 – could potentially be published, I have been of the opinion that this would be counter-productive. In principle I strongly support the idea that negative results should be published, but in our case the nature of those results strongly implies to me that we should not eniterely trust them, and a definitve test of the several hypotheses we planned to address will unfortunately have to await future experimental work.
