Science Fair Description

On Wednesday, September 12, we hosted a Biology Fair at the Carmel Valley Library in the Community Room from 3:00-5:00 pm. Our goal for the fair was to give young students in the community exposure to the life sciences and to potentially spark their interest in learning more about biology. We set up 8 different stations around the room that all had simple activities for the students to try, and different members of the team attended to each station to help the students participate in the activities and to answer questions. Some of the activities that students could try included participating in an online Kahoot! quiz on the work of ecologists, using marshmallows and toothpicks to make a model of the DNA double helix structure, matching DNA with RNA and RNA to amino acids, building models of proteins, guessing the number of chromosomes in different organisms, practicing using a microscope to look at common items and using pipettes to transfer colored water, and making models of plant and animal cells with candy. Students seemed to enjoy learning about all of the different subjects and getting to do hands-on activities, and they gained exposure to both basic concepts of biology as well as simple lab procedures.

Caption: this is a banana!

Interview

On Friday, September 14, some of our team members visited Professor Eric Schmelz’s lab at the University of California, San Diego to discuss our project and ask for feedback on it. We inquired about background information on fungi and bacteria’s effects on plants, potential ethical issues that could arise from the development of our project, how to address those issues, and suggestions and improvements for our project. From this interview, we learned that different fungi have different effects on the growth of plants, and that these effects can be both positive or negative, and Professor Schmelz reminded us of previous cases in history where fungi and bacteria had significant negative effects on plants. We learned how people have overcome the threats of fungi and bacteria on plants in the past, such as by creating more diversity among plants so that those that are resistant to the fungi and bacteria are able to populate. We learned that there are political and religious issues that need to be addressed, and the unknown effects of altering certain jumping genes on the human body. As for suggestions for our project, Professor Schmelz encouraged us to try enzyme evolution to further expand the scope our results, and we integrated his suggestion into our wetlab work as part of the project.

Professor

Specifically, how do fungi affect the growth of plants? The effect of fungi on the growth of plants varies. Some can be deadly and directly target the root of the plant which slows down the growth significantly. But for some, the effect can be very positive and the plant won’t be able to grow without the help of those fungi. Were there any cases in the past where specific fungus or bacteria seriously endangered certain types of plants? How did we overcome the threat? There were many cases in the history where the fungus or bacteria seriously endangered certain types of plants. For example, the Irish potato famine can be one of them and in that outbreak, people dealt with it by abandoning their farms and leaving the land. Even now this practice is common throughout the farm regions of the South America. Another way to more effectively resist the threat is by creating resistance to the infection and create diversity in the plant like what we are doing. If we develop this treatment and implement it to the crops or plants that people consume, will there be any ethical issues? And how would scientists address those issues? When we are experimenting with food that people consume, it is critical for the people to know what they are intaking. There are millions of so called jumping genes which are dead, transposable genes that can be altered to our benefits, but even inserting a single different genes can cause discrepancy with 2-3% of the population which will hurt both the maker and the consumer. The maker will probably be sued and lose tons of money while the consumers will suffer from their body’s reactions. Aside from these considerations, there are political and religious concerns that we cannot address. We would like to experiment with mutations and hope to evolve some genes in chitinase. Do you have any suggestions for us in terms of lab work? Production of chitinase genes through transformation can be very effective. However fungi can still be resistant to the chitinase due to their ability to shield themself against chitinase which is called isolation. If you refer to specific government websites, they have collection of all the genes that they have experimented with and from that we might be able to find the best strand of chitinase sequence. Since there is this resource, we can utilize it in our studies. Nature has also experimented with chitinase evolution over hundreds of years and that can also be our resource in finding the best strand of chitinase aside from our bacterial evolution experiment.