By Sean Scott '25 (Editor-in-chief)
Please note: This article was written in May 2024
This May, the FCC lecture hall was once again buzzing with the energy of the annual Natural History Research Conference. The second of its kind at FCS, it was the culmination of a year of students’ independent research projects conducted primarily in the biology labs, done alone or in groups of up to four. Students proudly presented their work, either with a poster or a ten-minute talk accompanied by a slideshow, to fellow student researchers and other members of the FCS community in the audience.
Before FCS students took the podium, attendees were treated to an engaging keynote presentation from Isabella Petitta, a graduate student at Penn State University. Her informative talk gave an overview of her research and conservation of pollinators and wild plants in Pennsylvania. She began by speaking about the great variety within the hundreds of wild bee species in the state. She then moved into explaining the possibilities for conserving threatened pollinators that lie in conserving the plants they visit. Focusing on her work with wild lupine, she explained its importance to various pollinators and how it can benefit from prescribed fire, the planned and controlled burning of certain areas of land to stimulate new growth.
The student presentations that followed were equally engaging. Many presentations centered on students’ work with species identification via DNA barcoding. Standard procedure for these projects involved students extracting DNA from specimen tissue and running polymerase chain reactions (PCR) to amplify the barcode gene, a section of mitochondrial DNA which is both unique to and consistent across each species. Students then compared their sequences to others in the Barcode of Life Data (BOLD) database, a collection of millions of barcode sequences representing over 350,000 species, in order to identify the species of their specimens. In several presentations, students explained their work researching campus insects. For various specimens of bees and ants, students determined their species as well as the specific type of Wolbachia bacteria that had infected some of the specimens. These projects contributed to our understanding of the biodiversity on our own campus, as some of the species identified had never before been recorded on campus, or anywhere in Montgomery County for that matter. Several other groups also used DNA barcoding to explore species beyond the boundaries of our campus. One involved investigating tardigrades, highly resilient microorganisms that can survive extreme conditions. A couple of projects explored fungi – one examined the genetic diversity of chestnut blight fungus in a nearby park, and another was species identification of Russula fungus. Others focused on species identification of parasitic wasps (some of which were the first barcodes of their species to be added to the BOLD database!) and the Xerochlora genus of emerald moths. In addition, there were several projects that did not entail DNA barcoding at all. These topics included auditory analysis of insect calling in relation to aspects of their surroundings, testing the decision-making process of Physarum slime mold in mazes, and investigating the magnitude of bioluminescence in Panellus fungus as affected by different chemicals.
Packed with information and intriguing research, the conference was truly a celebration of student achievement and discovery.
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