Foreign Perspectives

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.