Invasion of the Next Generation

This article is part of a series of blog posts about a research collaboration with students from Didcot Girls’ School. All posts can be found under the category STEM Club

Tomorrow – or rather today by the time I finished writing this –  I will be opening my bench and my blog to a small group of very enthusiastic 14-15 year old students from Didcot Girls’ School. They will help me with my plant cell biology research over the course of the next few months,  accompanied by their teacher,  Nuffield Education/Science and Plants for Schools Fellow Vicki Cottrell and their school technician Lynn. As part of her secondment Vicki is going to be a weekly visitor at Oxford Brookes over the next months, whereas we have planned five visits in total for the girls. Vicki has a background in plant science and is an enthusiastic microscopist, so this will be great fun!

I have set up guest blog accounts for Vicki and the student team and I hope that they will write something about their experiences in our lab and the research they will be carrying out (of course without giving away any secret data). Our ultimate dream goal is to publish a paper with Vicki as co-author and everyone else named in the acknowledgements. So, watch this space and keep your fingers crossed that we will discover something exciting!  The students have already been talking about the Golgi apparatus, the endoplasmic reticulum and cancer cell biology in their STEM science club, which impressed me immensely. They will be covering cell biology only later at school and this is the first time that they have come across organelles. Yet they have already discussed how transport vesicles recognise the correct target membranes! I admit that I am slightly scared of their questions. :))

 

 

PS: What are we going to research?

Golgi bodies, duh! 

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