Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hi, I have competed in the science fair for the last five years, and have placed for all five years at the county science fair. Last year I finished second in Medcine and Health, and would like to create another competitive project. I will be a junior, and I have around 6-7 months to work on a project. My doctor has agreed to help, and so has my teacher.
I would like to complete a project that uses Resveratrol helping people lose fat. I read about it in an article and the article says that Resveratrol helps stimulate the creation of adiponectin.
I have this idea, but I do not know how to test it, or how to create a good project using it. I am open to any ideas on this topic, and any idea in the medcine and health category.
Thank You

Hi,

This is a great idea for a project and it’s good you are starting early. Resveratrol is a phenolic component of many plants that may have many physiological effects on humans and adiponectin is a hormone that regulates glucose levels and fatty acid catabolism. There are not a lot of published studies on this subject, so this would be a unique topic for a science fair project. A study of the effects of resveratrol on adiponectin levels is a great idea and would have significant implications for human health issues.

However, doing a study like this in humans would be like a clinical trial and would require supervision from a qualified medical institution as well as approval from a scientific review committee. I’m not sure that you would be able to get approval for a project working with human subjects.

However, it would definitely be worthwhile to study in a different animal like obese or diabetic mice. You would still need to obtain approval from your local scientific review committee, but it should be possible to do the project.

If you have not done a project like this before, here is the information for getting approval for a project. For a top winning project, it is very important to follow all of the rules.

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... _src.shtml

Do you have access to a laboratory where you could grow mice? Do you have a source of resrveratrol and a method for testing it? Do you have a method for measuring adiponectin? The final selection of your project will depend on your resources, so you should consider all possible options at this point.

Have you done background reading on the topic? Do you have an idea for a specific experimental protocol? Was the article that gave you the idea for this project a scientific paper? Please let me know if you need more information on this topic.

Donna Hardy

Thank you for giving me ideas to start my project with. I have done some more research and found a website with a lot of information.
I was wondering if you think it would be possible to do this project using yeast in petri dishes and measuring the growth. I am not sure how to measure the growth, or if it would work. What I would do is inject a high caloric diet into the one plate of yeast, and in the other plate I would use resveratrol.I could then track the growth of the yeast. The yeast would be used instead of the the mice.
Thank you.

Hi.

You could do an experiment measuring the effects of reservatrol on yeast growing on different culture media. However, I don't believe yeast produce adiponectin, so you would not be able to include this aspect of your question in the experiment. However, it might be a worthwhile experiment and would definitely be easier to do. Why don’t you try to do some more background reading on the topic? You should look for any research papers done on a similar topic, and try to identify a unique experiment (with a purpose) that you could also do.

Donna Hardy