As part of the BioByte, 22 ambitious students of the 10th and 11th grade from all over Middle Germany visited the IPB on August 10 to learn by practical example about what can be hidden behind the field of bioinformatics. During a guided tour through the greenhouses, the girls and boys first learned interesting facts about the institute and the increasingly important role of bio- and chemoinformatics for our research projects. Next, the students could do their own experiments in the laboratory and, under the expert guidance of Pauline Stark, perform the exciting procedure of preparing a sample for metabolite analysis using LC-MS. To do this, they crushed the leaves, pulp and fruit peel of tomato plants with liquid nitrogen and used ethanol and hexane to separate the polar from the non-polar metabolites. The chromatographic separation was performed on a thin-layer plate followed by a specific color reaction to visualize the different metabolites. Finally, the participants learned from Steffen Neumann how to evaluate the numerous signals generated by separation of metabolites with LC-MS. Based on the motto "Blood or ketchup?", they jointly created a workflow for the analysis of mass peaks from tomato plants. Overall, the event was very successful. The students showed great interest and asked many smart questions.
The BioByte is a multi-day summer school that has been organized and conducted by the Institute of Computer Science at MLU, the IPB and the IPK in Gatersleben since 2018. It is intended to arouse interest in bioinformatics and to help students in deciding what to study.
