We are very pleased to announce some additional science fair successes by TSoG Mentorship students! Copernicus student Avaniko Asokkumar and his partner Prakul Singh who attend Vandeventer Middle School in Frisco were selected to advance to the regional science fair. Their project looked at the ability of the slime mold Physarum polycephalum to optimize paths between multiple sources of food, based on the size of the food source. Slime molds are a group of single celled eukaryotic organisms that can aggregate together to form multicellular structures. Physarum polycephalum can exist as a single celled amoeba or as plasmodium, giant multinucleated cells that forms vein-like networks. When in the plasmodium state, the organism can solve complex mazes to reach a food source. Kepler Student Snehith Rayavaram and his partners Dhruva Rao and Karthik Naidu won first place in the materials science category at Plano East Senior High School. Snehith and his team had an engineering goal of [...]
To carry on with the theme of DNA, I thought today we would talk about a process downstream from PCR – Sequencing! Sequencing is the process of determining the order of the four base pairs in a DNA strand. There are three primary methods of DNA sequencing: Sanger sequencing, Next-generation sequencing, and third generation sequencing methods. Sanger sequencing was the first major breakthrough in reliable DNA sequencing. Developed in 1977 by Frederick Sanger, Sanger sequencing relies on a method called chain termination. Sanger sequencing shares some similarities to PCR. Like PCR, Sanger sequencing requires A DNA template, a primer, and DNA polymerase. However unlike PCR, Sanger sequencing uses only one primer which is complimentary to the forward strand of the template DNA. Therefore, the DNA polymerase will only amplify the main strand – since DNA strands are complimentary we only need to know the sequence of one strand, so this is not a problem. Another difference is that[...]
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