Sarah won the Strontium Zone in June 2012, she tells us how she spent her winnings:
I co-organised the residential, 1-week Astrobiology Summer Academy 2013, which brought together 10 students (15-18 years old) from schools in Shetland, 4 from Edinburgh, 1 from Leicester and two PhD students from NASA (USA) to experience university research in biology, astronomy and geology.
I was responsible for the biology activity day. It kicked off with an introduction round where students picked objects from a table and discussed whether they were alive or dead, organic or inorganic (e.g. limestone, toothbrush, a flower, a lemon, ball of yarn etc), which was actually quite difficult! We then had a lecture by Lynn Rothshild, head of Synthetic Biology at NASA, before hitting the lab and the biology assault course that I devise to simulate interdisciplinary research.
In 5 expert teams, the students analysed 12 mystery samples from Planet Earth and tested whether the organic molecules we had spoken about earlier were present. The Lipids team used brown paper and emulsions, the DNA team precipitated DNA with cold ethanol (strawberries are amazing!), the starch team used iodine and the protein team performed Bradford Assays. They came up with control tests and repeated experiments that had shown up as inconclusive. The Project Managing team kept track of who got how much of which sample and collected the results.
Students extracting DNA from mystery samples from Planet Earth
Following lunch, a lecture on the origins of life on Earth and a lab tour, they then decided which 4 samples would be suitable for mass spectrometry (high in protein and low in lipids) and digested them, before hearing from two PhD students about how cells make decisions and what extremes of life are on Earth. They then got a demonstration of a home-built visible light spectrometer, a lecture on how it could be used to detect organic molecules in space, and instructions on how to build their own using phone cameras and spectralworkbench.org and public lab.
I then ran the samples and two days later I revealed the protein sequences they had identified by mass spectrometry, which included Fragaria ananassa (strawberry!), Musa acuminata (banana!), Hordeum vulgare and Saccharomyces cerevisiae (Barley + Yeast = Marmite) and Ostreococcus tauri (the green alga I work on).
The following day, the students presented at a public event at Edinburgh Botanic Gardens and constructed hands-on displays of
- the spectrometer and of the search for life on Mars, including handing out make-your-own-spectrometer packs to the public
- a lego & jelly primordial soup in which children could attach the basic building blocks of life to each other, and build amino acids
- displays of extreme environments on Earth (including a dry ice volcano) and a quiz of which animal can survive which extreme conditions and how.
Some photos are available on our website here and we even made the news in Shetland!
We’ll be scaling it all up and making it a national academy next year, will keep you posted. I’m also speaking to teachers to generate mass spectrometry results that can be used in class rooms.
