Foreign Perspectives

The week has really flown in and it’s hard to believe that there’s only a day and a half to go.

We collected our horse chestnut leaves this morning on the way down to the lab. First thing was to finalise the experimental plan that I’d knocked up last night. With that approved we set to work on comparing the photosynthesis of normal leaves with those infested with tree miner. That took a lot longer than expected as we had to do a full oxygen electrode run on the infested leaf and we needed to find out how much chlorophyll was in each leaf sample so we finished the afternoon with only one of the three planned replicates completed. Not a disaster but it means that we’ll need to spend a couple of hours tomorrow morning completing the experimental phase.

The final compulsory tutorial was on making presentations with the optional one going through various aspects of the end of course assessment.

In principle, we hope to complete the experiments by around 11am tomorrow which should leave us quite a while to write up the presentation. We’re first up on Friday morning which is a good thing in many ways as we don’t have to worry about seeing some fantastic idea from an earlier presentation and not being able to incorporate it into our own. It also makes for a rather relaxing end to the course for us.

The planned 1pm finish looks like it could be more like 11.30am though I may as well have lunch here rather than sitting an extra hour or more in the airport.

With everyone having had a go at the experiments on both sides of the lab there remained a number of things that various groups hadn’t had the time to do for one reason or another. So this morning was aimed at mopping up those gaps.

After an early lunch we set off on a tour of the Millennium and Walled gardens to give us a bit of inspiration for our own experiments. That left the afternoon for us to make a start on a design of an experiment of our own. For that we bounced ideas off other people with a view to building a small team to take on an experiment based on our ideas. We ended up with 10 separate teams which seems a little too many to me and is a number which will cause a spot of scheduling difficulty with the equipment tomorrow. We’ve to hand in a research proposal for our project tomorrow which gets a once-over by the tutor before we get going (it’s part of the final assessment too).

The evening lecture was a round-up of what we’d done over the last couple of days and how we might write it up for the end of course assessment. I’d thought that we’d be writing up one of the experiments as we did last year but in fact we’ve to run up a report covering all that was done over the last couple of days. More than that actually as we’ll need to include information about the work of some of the other groups too. Quite a lot to cover in 3000 words really.

The next day and a half is basically running our own experiment with Thursday afternoon intended to be devoted on preparing a presentation on it that we’ll make on Friday morning.

We moved on to the pigments section today.

For the morning, each group chose a plant from the selection to extract and identify the various photosynthetic pigments in their plant. We chose the tobacco plant which it turned out was the most reliable one to use for the thin layer chromatography (TLC) that was being used. For the second part of that experiment we shared our extract with another group and we each went on to do a spectrophotometric analysis of a different pigment to confirm that it was what we thought it was.

Just before lunch each group picked a flower to begin the analysis of the various pigments in them. That takes a while longer, hence the pre-lunch start on dissolving the flower before looking separately at the flavones and anthrocyanidins that it contained which it turned out takes quite a long sequence of operations before you get to the point where you’re doing the TLC and even then you may need to check it out under ultraviolet light. As you might expect when a long series of operations is involved, not all of the groups got the expected results first time around.

The evening saw two lectures. The compulsory one was on photosynthesis or rather on a number of aspects that our experiments covered along with some pointers as to what we should consider including in the ECA. The optional one was on reading scientific literature and mainly looked in some details about the good and bad points of two of the pre-reading papers that they’d provided. It turns out that the one that none of us could really make head or tail of was considered pretty much rubbish which agreed with our interpretation of it too.

One notable point was that the stats on the computer marked assignment (CMA) are now in and we’ve all passed. No word on grades but it means that we “only” need to pass the ECA now to pass the course.

We were split into two large groups yesterday with one group doing experiments whilst we were looking at some aspects of stress responses in the algae.

What we were doing initially was examining the response to light of two initially identical algae, one of which was exposed to a bright light and one of which wasn’t. In principle, they should each have shown an adaptation to the different lighting conditions. As always with plant experiments though there are lots of variables that can affect the result of any experiment so some of the groups doing the main experiment found what was expected, some found aspects that were expected and others found something entirely different. Why that was so seemed to be down to some variables that we’d inadvertently introduced (taking the algae from different regions of the flask mainly) and one that couldn’t be avoided (turning off the light over the weekend). Anyway, that took most of the day working with the oxygen electrode and the light box and then plotting the results.

Towards the end we managed to fit in another experiment looking at the concentration of malondialdehyde and another group did an ascorbate assay which I think we’re doing on Tuesday.

Together those took us neatly up to 5pm when they like us to leave the lab which leaves a bit of a gap before teatime at a quarter to six.

Two evening lectures this evening. The first compulsory one was basically a run-through of a range of mini case-studies on the various pigments talked about in the preparatory reading ie chlorophyll, cartenoids and flavonoids. Quite interesting and useful background to get us a bit more fired up about this residential which the majority of people are on simply because they have to do it for the life sciences degree.

The second one was notionally optional but probably useful to a lot of people as it was on the presentation which we have to prepare on Thursday afternoon and do on Friday morning. In previous years you’d to present to an audience comprised of what was then three different residential courses. This time around we’ve only to present to those doing our own course which reduces the time required somewhat and means that the course breaks up at 1pm rather than 3pm which suits a lot of people.

Quite a good day on the whole and one which gave us a chance to use a range of tools and techniques.

Heading off at 8am got me to the Nottingham campus not too much after 11am so it was quite quiet to begin with and the numbers of students are really only starting to build up now, just after lunch.

Registration runs on ’til after 3pm with the introductory lecture in the biology building just after 4pm so I’ve hours to fiddle around. As expected, the shopping centre on campus is closed over the weekend which meant a long trek down to the little shop in the hospital this afternoon.

Surprisingly the taxi was the same price as last year (Lenton on 0115 9 781 781 do the airport pickups for £19.50, just over half the price of the airport taxis; it’s best to arrange for them to collect you at the petrol station just outside the airport parking area as otherwise they charge for the airport parking.

I’ve acquired a green dot already which presumably has some significance for the division up into groups for the lab sessions that start tomorrow but hasn’t been mentioned in anything so far today.

The introductory spiel from the admin people, learning advisor, OUSA and the course director was a joint one for both SXR375 and SXR376 kicking off just after 4pm and running on to almost 5pm. That was immediately followed by the course specific stuff in our respective laboratories. Just one lab for the course this year as there are only 29 of us but we’ve been split up into two groups to do the experiments over the next two days, which we’ll be doing in groups of three.

They seem quite keen on evening lectures although a number of them are optional, including the one on Populations and polymorphism this evening. It was quite well attended but I’m not sure that a lot was taken in as a lot of people seemed quite tired from the days travelling.

In the room is a phone (free internal calls), wired internet connection (you need a cable for this which you can get (free) in the Cripps security office; the wifi varies from poor to non-existent in the rooms), desk, tea/coffee tray with kettle, sink, wardrobe, towels (with soap & shampoos) and a single bed. The shower-room and toilet is shared  by about half a dozen rooms.