Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hi my name is Silvia and I'm in 9th grade currently.
I'm in a Science Research class at my high school and I'm looking for a topic.
I don't want to do something that has been done before, and I was looking at science articles, but there were just to many to explore.
Please help me select a topic.

I'm interested in medical science. My father is a dermatologist so he's really willing to help me on skin-related topics.
I'm interested in skin cancer, diabetes, and just about anything medical-related.
As I said before, I want to do something that has never been done before.

Are there any interesting topics that I might want to research and conduct experiments?
What topics would you (amazing experts) do if you were a high school student?
What are some things that 'you' are interested in? What new discoveries interest you? Something specific


I think I can get access to college labs around here (LA) so there shouldn't be any problems about the difficulty of the project itself.
I'm willing to devote my time into this project! and I'm very excited!!!!!
Thank you for your help

Hi Silvia! Welcome to Scibuddies. I appreciate your enthusiasm as I am a biomedical scientist specializing in respiratory viruses and find the human body incredibly interesting. Choosing a research area is as much of a challenge for me as it is for you. As you say, you want to ask some questions that haven't been answered yet. There are a LOT of those!

Scibuddies has a topic selection wizard that you can use to narrow down your interests: https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... gister.php

Since your dad is a dermatologist, I would suggest that you pick a project related to skin. Look at all the zillions of skin-care products on the market! That tells you how important skin is to people. They want it to look good and be healthy as well as be a barrier against infection. You can study skin on people or you can study skin cells in the lab. That depends on whether you are interested more in the molecular side of the skin or the human side. Working with people, however, can require getting special permissions and approvals, especially if you want to test the effect of some skin cream or antibacterial treatment. Talk to your dad and see what he would suggest.

I study cells mostly. They can be grown in the lab fairly easily and I can treat them in different ways and measure the way they respond. The methods are not easy, however, and require a lot of expensive reagents and equipment. You can do experiments with skin cells if you have access to a lab and someone to help you.

Choosing a question to do a science project on is something you have to do yourself. You have to sit down and just think about what you might like to know: Does washing your hands with plain water get rid of bacteria? Do SPF creams really protect your skin against UV in sunlight? Are there any vitamins or supplements that can help keep skin healthy? Can collagen creams make old skin young again? Can we use stem cells to grow new skin?

I hope the other experts will jump in here and give their suggestions too. Biomedical science is a huge area and you have to decide what interests you most right now and also choose something that is doable with the lab resources that you have access to.

I'm sure whatever you pick, you will do a great job. So, think about it and get back to us and we will try to guide you along.

Good luck!

Sybee

Hi there,

SciB has already given you some great advice, and I agree that when choosing a question for a science project, the most important thing is that the topic is something that interests you. Since your dad is a dermatologist, he would definitely be a great resource for discussing ideas and potential questions about the skin. However, since you also mentioned that you may potentially seek out local university labs, I would definitely check out the webpages of these labs/researchers and see if they're working on a question that may be of interest to you. If there are, you should contact these labs and see if they're willing to chat with you about ideas and potentially let you work on your project in their lab. If you're interested in the skin, I would suggest looking up labs in the dermatology department of local universities (if a dermatology department exists in the school). Since you mentioned you're in LA, here is the UCLA dermatology department website (http://www.derm.med.ucla.edu/?pgid=6&pa ... 51e50d0ee8). Under the tab "basic science research", you can find the webpages of labs within this department. They all do very interesting things!

As for topics related to the skin, since I am a microbiologist, I can give you suggestions for potential projects that involve bacteria living on the skin. One of the hottest topics in microbiology right now is the human microbiota, which refers to the aggregate of microbes that are associated with and living on the surfaces of humans, most of which are harmless and actually beneficial to our health. Most studies on the human microbiota have focused on the microbes living inside our gut and how they contribute to our health, but another potential interesting group of microbes is the skin microbiota, or the microbes that live on our skin. The resident microbes on our skin are thought to protect our skin from being colonized by harmful pathogens by competing with them for colonization sites and nutrients. There are also some studies on how the composition of microbes on our skin can affect the odors we emit, and it is thought that people with a certain skin microbiota composition emit certain odor molecules that are more attractive to mosquitoes compared to people with different skin microbiota compositions. I think that there are many potential interesting topics that you can study with the skin microbiota, but I think projects of this topic would likely require working at a university lab.

In addition to beneficial bacteria living on the skin, some bacterial pathogens can colonize and invade the skin and cause serious disease. One such example is the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus, commonly referred to as Staph. You perhaps may have heard of Staph, and it is known to be a major human bacterial pathogen and causes tens of thousands of deaths and millions of outpatient and emergency room visits in the U.S. every year. It is also a bacterium that is known to be resistant to many antibiotics, and increased resistance has made it difficult to treat Staph infections. Hence, another potential topic is to study how Staph colonizes and invades the skin and cause disease.

Hope this helps! Feel free to post back and we'll be happy to discuss/brainstorm ideas with you!

Best,
Connie

Hi,

In college, one of the labs that I completed in microbiology class investigated the effects of exposure to UV light on the growth of prokaryote cells. UV light causes the formation of covalent bonds between thymine bases on the same DNA strand. These thymine dimers would result in mutations if not removed by DNA repair mechanisms. In this experiment, cells were grown on agar plates and then partially exposed to light from a UV lamp, so that half of the plate was covered by the lid of the petri dish. The cells covered by the petri dish were protected from UV radiation, because UV radiation cannot penetrate most plastic. To ensure uniform exposure, the UV lamp contained an 18-36 inch fluorescent bulb as well as shielding. Since you are interested in skin cancer, you can ask your teachers about modifying this experiment using epithelial HeLa cells, which can be obtained from organizations such as the ATCC (www.atcc.org) and the Coriell Institute for Medical Research (https://catalog.coriell.org/). You may also want to visit the link to research paper Repair of UV-induced thymine dimers is compromised in cells expressing the E6 protein from human papillomaviruses types 5 and 18 at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2409508/, because it studies the effects of UV damage on skin cells. Hope this helps.