Just before the end of term, nine boys who have been working on the Snowdrop DNA project were invited to The Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of science, for its annual Summer Science Exhibition to present their findings.
For the past year, the boys have been conducting pioneering research on snowdrop DNA through the Royal Society Partnership Grants Scheme, as part of a larger, sustained, collaborative project.
The innovative project saw the school partner with Rothamsted Research and the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) to carry out the first-ever research using DNA barcoding to discover relationships between different species of snowdrops. The project aimed to uncover how different snowdrop species have evolved from a common ancestor by studying DNA sequence similarities and differences.
The research took the boys to The National Trust’s Anglesey Abbey to work alongside experts to identify and gather different types of snowdrop species, to the state-of-the-art science laboratories at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, where they worked with bioinformaticians from the internationally renowned European Bioinformatics Institute to find similarities in the DNA sequences, and to Rothamstead Research where they carried out the DNA sequencing.
Ruben Jacob, Stirling Smallwood, Misch Saviski, Charlie Eggleton, Selim Sheikh, Alex Olleson, Henry Pascal, Boqing Kong and Emir Kenrick travelled to The Royal Society on 3 and 4 July to be part of the Young Researchers Zone, where other schools awarded with Royal Society Partnership Grants, were also presenting their projects.
During the day members of the public came to see the exhibition and hear the boys explain the project and their findings. Their communication skills were put to the test as they were required to explain their project to young children, adults and scientists such as Jim Al-Khalili and Dame Maggie Aderin-Pocock.
The exhibition was followed by a black-tie event in the evening where fellows of the Royal Society and invited guests looked round the exhibition and the boys explained what they had been doing to scientists who are the top in their fields, including the Founder of Oxford Nanopore, who invented the MinION, which they used to sequence the chloroplast DNA.
Mrs Jean Mainstone, Teacher of Biology and the boys’ mentor throughout the project explained, “Over the course of the project the boys have learned skills they would not normally develop until at least under-graduate level. They have demonstrated excellent communication skills and contributed to the scientific community. One of the boys commented that he will not fully appreciate this experience until he looks back at it at a later date. The boys who represented the school were phenomenal and I could not be prouder.”
Below is the phylogenetic tree that the boys made from their results of sequencing the chloroplast DNA from the snowdrops. Some of the species looked at did not yield enough quality DNA to enable them to be added to the tree. One species had not been sequenced previously, and so its relationship to the other species is new to science.
