Camborne Science and International Academy student project

We had the pleasure to be visited by five students of the Camborne Science and International Academy for a lab project over the last few months. Jasmine, Amy, Kyle, Lauren and Georgina (flanked in the picture by Aimee and Amy) came in for two afternoons every fortnight (not the easiest schedule for a microbiology project!) to do some actual research in an actual research lab. They experienced the usual dose of failures (welcome to the world of research!) but also came across some interesting findings that we hope to build on later. In addition to learning about various questions and approaches in microbial ecology, they gained a lot of practical experience: autoclaving media, collecting environmental samples, isolating soil bacteria and classifying them by colony morphology, working with dilution ranges, setting up phage enrichment cultures, performing plaque assays and bacterial transformation assays. All in all I hope they gained some useful experience. (I think that even discovering that you do not really like this type of work is valuable, as at least you can cross one career path of the list and move on!)