What does hurricane prep look like in our lab?
Meet the Peltz-Stelinski lab's dream team! Sure we cover the machines and move essential samples to freezers with back up generators. But today, there is a LOT more to do. We're off to the field!
Aside from twig die back and leaf discoloration, citrus greening disease causes premature fruit drop, produces low yield, bitter juice in small and lopsided fruit which may be hard. Which means Erik and Rosa regularly collect data on tree and fruit conditions in the experimental orchards. This week, fruit collection fell on a hurricane, holiday weekend right before the before ESA convention in Vancouver! So 6:00am we all met... in the rain and cold to harvest the fruit off 78 trees. Yup! Then we trooped back to the lab—cold, wet, and a little muddy—to measure orange sizes. Next week the packing house juicing will give us another glimmer at how the oligonucleotides are performing in field conditions. Not a lot of people laugh their way through picking fruit on cold rainy days in the gusty wind. I guess we're just amazing. Go team FANA!
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