Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hi, I am an high school sophomore and thinking about a science fair experimentation. My mom suffers from psoriasis on her knees. She has been trying various home remedies to reduce the inflamation etc. I am wondering how I can do some experimentation with the various treatments she has tried vs. OTC topicals. I have a mini DOE devised and have access to a microbiology lab that I can use to do my experimentation. My thoughts are to scrape some of the skin from affected area and treat with my combinations of topicals and herbals in my DOE.
My questions are as follows:
1. Will the above experiment work?
2. What will I be measuring or looking for? If I get some skin scrapings, mix it with sterile water, incubate it and streak it, what will I see?
ANy help will be great. Thanks.

Hi,

That's a great idea - and it connects your work to real-world problems. Testing medicines can be tricky for many reasons, and I noticed you planned NOT to expiriment directly on your mom! Good

To answer your questions:
1. Will the above experiment work? Scraping the skin is going to give you dead flaky skin to use, I don't think anything you medicate the dead flaky skin with is going to show you anything. I think you want to see if you can clear up the flaky red areas, which won't happen with skin scrapings.
2. What will I be measuring or looking for? If I get some skin scrapings, mix it with sterile water, incubate it and streak it, what will I see? If the skin cells you get are still alive (which might hurt your mom), they won't grow on bacterial culture medium - you would need cell culture medium and equipment and that gets more complicated (but not impossible). I think if you streak the scrapings you will end up culturing bacteria from the skin, not the skin cells themselves. Is there a connection between psoriasis and bacteria on the skin? Could you do some background research to find out?

I think that answers your questions and hopefully gets you started. Let me know what other questions come from here.

Tonya

Hello there,

Tonya gave you some great tips! I agree with her that if you apply medication on dead flaky skin, that will very likely not show you anything. I am not familiar with psoriasis too much, but I do know that it is a immune-mediated disease, so the causation is not necessarily microbial (though it might be interesting to see whether the bacterial commensal population on the skin of healthy patients and psoriasis patients are different and whether this has an effect on disease progression, but this is way beyond what you want to test). I would probably try to contact any labs that work on psoriasis and ask them what is the best experimental model you can use to try to test the effects of different medications on treatment of the disease condition.

Let us know if you have anymore questions!

Connie

Hi Ms. Tonya and Ms. Connie, Thank You for your feedback. The Microlab that was going to help me with my experimentation is too busy and will not be able to support my experimentation. So looks like I have to change my area of experimentation - something I can do at home or school lab. I am still investigating. Not sure how I can change my idea of Psoriasis and Treatment methods to be done without access to lab facilities.

pjain1998 wrote:Hi Ms. Tonya and Ms. Connie, Thank You for your feedback. The Microlab that was going to help me with my experimentation is too busy and will not be able to support my experimentation. So looks like I have to change my area of experimentation - something I can do at home or school lab. I am still investigating. Not sure how I can change my idea of Psoriasis and Treatment methods to be done without access to lab facilities.

I am sorry to hear you lost that resource. Have you considered a similar bacterial project, where you buy the plates and make your own incubator? Have a look through the project ideas on Science Buddies and let me kow if you see anything you would like to do. I can help you decide if you can do it without a lab facility to help you or not.

OR perhaps you want to do the above (make your own incubator) - you could test if there is a difference in the amount of bacteria collected from skin signs with psoriosis damage and those without. Does that idea get you started on formulating your hypothesis?

Tonya