27.07.2018

During this year's summer holidays, the IPB hosted two programs for high-school students. Both the BioBYTE Summer School of the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and the MINT-Lab of the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences recently visited our institute for a theme day.

For the Summer School BioBYTE, a one-week orientation course, 18 students came to the MLU in Halle to get to know the field of bioinformatics. The theme of the day at the IPB was how to identify metabolites of plants. Under the guidance of Dr. Stefanie Döll and Sylvia Krüger (Dept. of Stress and Developmental Biology), the participants could do some hands-on work in the lab. They  prepared a plant extract, that they then analyzed by mass spectrometry. With this method, chemical compounds from plant extracts can be identified and quantified in a very sensitive and comprehensive manner. This field of research - also known as metabolomics - is one of IPB's specialties. The data obtained in the analyses are often so extensive that they can usually only be evaluated with the aid of bioinformatics methods. Therefore, the participants then continued with their experiment in front of the computer. Bioinformatician Hendrik Treutler from the IPB showed them how to analyze metabolomics data. One of the playful challenges the students had to solve was distinguishing the datasets of blood and ketchup. BioBYTE was organized by the Institute of Computer Science of theMLU as well as the IPB, the Leibniz-Institute for Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK) Gatersleben, the German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv ) Halle-Jena-Leipzig and the Science Campus Halle for the first time this year.

The MINT-Lab of the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences visited with eight students and four supervisors this year. Prof. Sabine Rosahl and her group had again prepared various experiments on how to prove that a plant has been successfully genetically engineered or not. For example, the students stained leaves of potato plants, which were genetically modified using the new gene editing method CRISPR-Cas9. The staining revealed whether a plant had lost the ability to produce a particular chemical compound. "That's actually part of the work of one of my doctoral students. We want to better understand how the plant fends off the potato late blight pathogen with this substance." explains Prof. Rosahl while she shows the students a phytochamber in which the potato plants are grown. As soon as the door to the brightly lit chamber opened, the mobile phones and cameras went up, because at the MINT-Lab, the participants document everything on video. At the end of the two-week orientation at various stations, they will create a colorful YouTube video that you can watch on the "Make up your MINT!" channel: www.youtube.com/c/Make -up-your-mintDe