25th AprilYear 13 Biologists at Imperial College
On Thursday 14th and Friday 15th March, Year 13 Biology students had the incredible opportunity to visit Imperial College London to experience two days of genetic engineering techniques with Dr McKinnon and his team in their world famous teaching labs.
The students spent a busy first day learning how to use proper gilson pipettes and taking part in serial dilutions and bacterial transformations. They applied serial dilutions to dilution plating and left them overnight to see how they would develop. The second day was just as packed, with students getting straight to work setting up an enzyme digest using plasmids and restriction enzymes. While they waited for these to work, students set up gels to carry out a gel electrophoresis, a laboratory technique used to separate DNA. After lunch they used a machine to visualise their DNA fragment bands on the gel. They also got to see their dilution plates and plasmid bacterial transformation plates. A few of them even managed to replicate enough plasmid for Dr McKinnon to use in his lab!
Imperial College London is one of the top 3 universities in the UK and is ranked in the top 10 in the world, so this really was an enormous privilege for our budding biologists. A huge thank you to our parent governor, Dr McKinnon and his team at the university for a really fun-packed two days, the students and staff who attended all enjoyed it very much!
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