A North Georgia College & State University professor is making waves on the scientific landscape with her work on protein found in the skin of some cephalopods.Holly Carpenter Desai, a chemistry professor at North Georgia and 2002 graduate of the university, for three years has been studying reflectin, a protein found in the skin of squids, octopuses and cuttlefish, and her work has caught the eye of the Air Force, which funded the research.“(The animals) are capable of very sophisticated, dynamic color change behavioral responses,” Desai said. “Which is really cool.”Reflectin is essential in that mechanism.The Air Force and researchers see potential to use the protein’s attributes in technological and medical applications.“From a materials perspective, to have a protein that you can control the color of is very useful to be able to modulate that color,” Desai said.Possible uses could include advanced pixels on LCD TVs or medical implants capable of color change to indicate possible malfunctions.But, Desai said, that day is not really on their radar right now.“This is a completely new class of protein material that we don’t know a lot about,” she said. “(The Air Force was) interested in a fundamental understanding of how it works and how we could use it for different applications. ... We’re still very much in the initial phase of how it works.”The three-year research grant from the Air Force ran out in November of last year, but Desai said she is reapplying this year.What she and her team of undergraduate students are doing on campus is genetically engineering the protein and seeing how it reacts with other proteins, including elastin, which is found in humans and provides strength and flexibility to connective tissue.That combination could be useful in the medical field.Another large part of the work they are doing is trying to determine the structure of the protein at the molecular level.Desai said the protein is a polymer, a large molecule composed of repeating structural units, in the case of reflectin, five structural units. If they can determine which units provide reflectin with its spectral properties, it would be much easier to translate the material into real-world applications.“Our research is looking at how to break down the individual units of that polymer to understand what part of it is most important,” she said.She will have help in that area in May and June.Desai recently was awarded the Burroughs Wellcome Foundation grant, which she will use to travel with a student to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California in San Diego to conduct further research on the protein, using specialized equipment that is not accessible at North Georgia.“The grant that I have with Burroughs Wellcome is to extend what we’re doing already with reflectin but also to move into new systems — to try and get down to the molecular level,” she said.The reflectin protein is fairly new in the science field and not much literature is available on it.The first paper came out in 2004 from the University of Hawaii, and Desai has been on board since 2009.