An important breakthrough came for us during this quarter that was quite accidental. We are designing defined media for L. crescens. Our first such medium was made about 9 months earlier and we continue to improve upon it. We want to develop the best defiend medium we can that can then be easily adapted to a CLas medium based on the metabolomics of the psyllid hemolymph and citrus phloem (data from the Killiny lab). The design of these medium is largely based on trying to reproduce the constituents of BM-7, the undefined medium typcailly used to culture L. crescens. One of those constituents is an insect cell culture medium called Grace’s medium. The recipe for Grace’s is well known and the medium is available commercially from at least three sources. We have made Grace’s medium from scratch ourselves and it doesn’t do as well as the commerically obtained Grace’s medium for culturing L. crescens. So there is something awry in the recipes that are published. Furthermore, one of the sources of Grace’s medium we obtained commercially provides excellent growth of L. crescens. This was the case with one batch from this company and wasn’t reproducible in other batches. So we are in the process of performing metabolomics of this purchased medium to learn how it might be doing so well in the culturing of L. crrescens. Once we know that, we should be able to design better media for L. crescens. We are also using this great batch of Grace’s medium in various media to culture CLas.