We celebrated the success of the 90 Scottish Nuffield Research Placement students 2022 at the University of Glasgow Advanced Research Centre. It was also the 25th birthday of Nuffield Research Placement so we got cake too! We are so proud of the achievements of our three students in completing the placements. Students wrote up their project … Read more
Our Nuffield students analysed the Krona chart of the DNA sequencing results for the soil samples collected so far as part of our project, each student with a different scientific aim. The Krona chart shows the number of DNA reads found in each soil sample from all of the microbes present in the soil and … Read more
Daria, Mia and Sarah have added map pins with photos and environmental data about their soil samples to our interactive map.
For the third and final part of their placement, we are so excited that Daria, Mia and Sarah can join us in person in the lab here at The University of St Andrews!
The second part of the placement was analysing DNA sequencing data for previously gathered soil samples using the interactive Krona charts just produced by Bioinformatics.
The first thing our students did was fieldwork to collect soil samples and environmental data. We posted out our kit boxes and soil augers to them so that they could collect soil locally and add pins to our interactive map.
While all three of our Nuffield Research Placement students have some aspects of their project in common, such as collecting a soil sample and extracting DNA from it, they each have a different aspect to look at with their analysis of our DNA sequencing results so far. Daria is investigating the diversity of bacteria, eukaryote … Read more
On day 9 we talked about how we could sequence the DNA we made on day 4, to identify what bacteria were present. Nowadays there are computer programmes where you insert a DNA sequence e.g. ACTGGACTAG… and it comes out with the closest matched options from its database. Another, more accurate method involves you figuring … Read more
On Day 8 we observed the new growth on the agar plates and wrote down our observations. The bacterial colonies varied from several different colours, shapes and sizes which you can see in the image below. To see the individual bacteria we went through a procedure which involved using an inoculation loop to remove a … Read more
On day 5 we used a machine to find out the how much DNA was in each sample of DNA we got the previous day. Using the results from the machine we then found out how much of each sample we needed for the next thing we did. The next thing we did was run … Read more