Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hello,

I am deeply stressed out as my school's science fair is taking place in a about a week and the topics must be experimental in nature. A lot of people are going to tell their judges that they did an experiment but actually did not and made their graphs up. I really don't want to do that because I hate lying! My topic is from this website and is about the ideal environment for bioengineering a kidney. I obviously cannot create a kidney myself but I was wondering if this topic still counts as experimental and that it's just a different kind of experiment. Please reply soon!


Thanks,

Leslie

Hi Leslie,

Definitely do not make up data for a graph! That is the worst thing a scientist can do.

Is your project Creating a Kidney: How Stem Cells can be used to Bioengineer a Vital Organ? https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... p013.shtml

This is an advanced project and you need to have studied biology and chemistry to really understand what is going on. It is hard! What you did here is what a scientist would do to prepare for carrying out experiments. Lots of reading, thinking and planning. All of this is necessary before you even go into the lab. It may not be an actual experiment, but it is what you HAVE to do before you start.

I don't know how strict your judges are but in my opinion, this type of online research and planning is just as important as the actual lab experiments to test a hypothesis. If your reading and thinking and planning are not done correctly then the experiments are not going to work and you are wasting your time.

So, I would recommend that you work really hard to write up your plans for how a scientist would attempt to make stem cells turn into a complete organ. The key of course is choosing the right factors and conditions to trick the stem cells into growing and dividing and turning into a kidney. You have to read and understand a lot of hard science to do this, but we can help when you have questions.

I think the key to making this a successful project is PICTURES and even maybe a video running on a laptop or a monitor. Find images online of stem cells, organs being grown in tissue culture, other pictures showing the lab methods used and a diagram of what a human kidney looks like on the inside to show what parts need to be formed by stem cells. If you have a friend who is a medical student, they might be able to borrow a model of a kidney for you to show. That would be really cool! If you have found some scientific articles on making stem cells differentiate into organs, print some of the figures to show as examples of how the process works.

One other sort of way out idea would be to borrow a good microscope and set it up on your display table with a slide showing some cells. If you could borrow a slide showing stained kidney cells that would be great, but otherwise you could just scrape some cheek cells and put them on a slide and stain them with crystal violet or some other common stain. You don't have to do this of course but it would make your presentation more interesting.

I hope this helps relieve some of your stress! Let us know if you have more questions.

Sybee

Hi,

Thank you so much for replying! It means a lot! I was wondering if you had any ideas as to how I could make a variation of the project online, perhaps more simplified? If possible, I don't want to bite off more than I can chew and I don't have much time to do anything drastically different. Help?

Thanks,

Leslie

Hi Leslie,

Well, we can help you chew up a lot of stuff! Don't worry. I know the scientific jargon can be pretty hard to understand but trust me it really does make sense. Remember that scientists have been doing this a lot longer than you have so they don't need to explain all the details all the time.

I don't know how much time you have but concentrate first on understanding the principles. What makes a stem cell turn into a kidney cell instead of a brain cell? For that matter, what is a stem cell? Where do they come from? These are all questions the judges may ask you and so you need to have a good understanding of the system.

Sit down for an hour or so and just google the heck out of the subject and copy out the info and pictures into a Word doc or Powerpoint that you can use later to print some stuff to show on your display. Be sure to also copy the URL so you can find it again and the name of the source. Always give the source when you borrow stuff! That's very important.

Decide which stem cells to use based on your search. Where would you get them if you were going to try and make a kidney? If you want to make one for a person then you have to use human stem cells. These can come from bone marrow for one place. Describe how you would isolate these cells in the lab and grow them in culture.

Now comes the really important part--the protein growth and differentiation factors that you have to add to the stem cell culture to trick the cells into becoming a kidney instead of a brain! This is hard and I don't know what they all are. You will have to dig this info out of your search and I can help you if you get stuck with all the unfamiliar terms.

Now you do the virtual experiment! Put all the stuff together in the culture dish, wave your magic wand over it and then let it sit at 37 C for a couple days.

Did you find a virtual microscope or better yet a real microscope that you can borrow? If we were in the lab we would take the culture dish out of the incubator and look at the cells under a special microscope that has the objective lenses underneath instead of on the top. That's because the cells grow on the bottom of the dish. What do you expect to see? Not teeny little kidneys, I'm afraid, but clumps of cells that are beginning to differentiate into kidney tissue. Google images and try to find some microphotographs of kidney cells that you can show in your display. People want to know what the new kidney will look like. Growing a few cells is easy but growing a whole functioning organ is beyond the ability of scientists so far.

Well, I'll stop here and you can post again with more questions. I want you to do as good a project as you can but I know that you only have so much time. Get going on searching and reading and writing about the project. Find lots of pictures that illustrate stem cell organ construction. Try to make your story just as if you were in the lab doing the real work. Then you can explain it step by step for the judges and show them the pictures at each step.

Good luck!

Sybee