Bang Goes the Borders
On Sunday the 22nd of September, a team of ScienceGrrls travelled all the way to the Scottish Borders, Melrose, to attend the annual Bang Goes the Borders event and unveil our brand new genetics activity. Bang goes the borders is an exciting day-long event for everyone to enjoy with plenty of STEM based hands-on activities.
The ScienceGrrl’s had an amazing day promoting our unsung heroine Barbara McClintock- an incredible female scientist who had won a Nobel Prize for her work in genetics. Travelling to St Marys School on the beautiful sunny day felt especially exciting with a new activity under our wings.
The team presented a series of genetic themed experiments, kicking thing off with a simple “smelly molecules” experiment and finishing with the unveiling of our exciting new activity, . The running theme was a mixture of genetics and senses, to teach enthusiastic (and hopefully budding scientists) pupils how your genes make you, you and that everyone is a different “mix” of genes, thanks to your mum and dad!
Part of this entailed testing our wonderful participants for the TAS2R388 gene, an autosomal dominant variant of which will allow you to taste bitter compounds, specifically PTC! We used taste strips containing different compounds to test who was a super taster and who was simply “not bitter”. In order to add a sweet twist on things, we finally asked participants to try the final part of our new experiment, miracle berries!
These berries use a protein called miraculin to coat your taste buds, changing the shape of the receptor and switching sour tastes for sweet! It was really interesting seeing everyone’s reaction when they bit into lemon slices and didn’t show a face curdling reaction of sourness!
We asked participants to fill out our worksheet and tally their scores at the end, so we could collate this data into a population study.
From the results of our mini population study, we saw that more participants that were Not Bitter had a better sense of smell than Supertasters, while more Supertasters had a low sense of smell. However, the miraculin from our miracle berries worked for more Supertasters than Not Bitter participants.
Over the next coming weeks, ScienceGrrls are going to be a part of Curiousity Live at Glasgow Science Centre, where we will hopefully be bringing our new genetics activity to get more data, celebrate women in STEM and encourage more people to get excited about science!