Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hi all,

I am planning on participating in the science fair this year and had a few topics of interest in mind but I wasn't sure how to go about setting up an experiment for them. My first idea was to do an experiment testing the protection of sunscreen against skin-aging from UV light and to see the affected skin. Or along the lines of skin experiments I was thinking about perhaps examining the different proteins and genes that make up skin spots or discolorization. A last idea I had was simulating different types of run-off and seeing how they affected microorganisms. If anyone has any ideas on how to set up procedures to run these experiments your knowledge would be greatly appreciated!

Hi,

I noticed you wrote this post almost a month ago, but I am hoping I can still be of help to you! Both of these ideas are interesting, I think for the skin project it would be cool if you had access to a skin cell line; you could culture these cells, expose them to UV light, and then determine its effects on cell viability and quantify the expressions of specific genes. Some genes of interest could be those related to DNA damage or reactive oxygen species. This paper gives more insight regarding this project: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8597149/

For the microbiology project, you could examine the different microorganisms associated with run-off. For this, you simply would need to dilute your sample (run-off) and plate them on some kind of agar. A lot of microorganisms are not able to be cultured in a lab, but once you plate your samples you could determine some of their characteristics by using biochemical assays and microscopy. This paper summarizes some of those techniques: https://asm.org/articles/2020/february/ ... wth,-stain

Again, I hope this can still help you! Please feel free to reach out if you want to discuss these project ideas or others further, we are happy to help!

--Brandi