Ever wondered what stories an animal’s whisker could tell? Well, a new paper published by MIMMP’s PhD student Nico Lübcker might help answer that.

Nico Lübcker and colleagues recently developed a novel method to analyze multiple steroids deposited chronologically along the length of seal whiskers. Their findings have now been published in a new article “What’s in a whisker? High-throughput analysis of twenty-eight C19 and C21 steroids in mammalian whiskers by ultra-performance convergence chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry”.

This study describes an accurate quantification method for multiple steroids, measured in a single chromatography step. The advantage of this new development is that it reduces the cost and time associated with such analyses by previous methods.

This is an exciting advancement because it contributes to our understanding of the impact of stress (associated with environmental/climatic changes) on the health and survival of organisms, and also allows us to delineate the reproductive cycles of free-living mammals. This becomes especially useful for organisms with cryptic life stages, like seals.

To read more from this study, access the online article here.