STEM Showcase - Life, Health and Chemical Sciences
KAREN FOLEY: Welcome back to the Student Hub Live STEM Showcase. In this session, we have Life, Health, and Chemical Sciences. And we're splitting the session into two parts. The first part, we're going to do a chromatography experiment. And in the second part, we're going to show you a reality app and look at the human heart. So it's going to be a very exciting session. I welcome Claire Turner and Nick Chatteron here to the studio today. So chromatography, where and when does this take place? And why is it so interesting?
NICK CHATTERTON: Would you like to start?
CLAIRE TURNER: No, no.
NICK CHATTERTON: OK, it's used as a key technique in many different areas of science, so forensic science to identify the trace amounts of a particular chemical, also food science to help quality control, and also very much in controlled or banned substances in terms of sport and that sort of thing.
What you're able to do with this technique is identify small amounts of chemicals that could give a signature as to that they're there and how much is there. So it's really, really important in all kinds of areas, certainly in chemistry, and generally in science. And it's a method of essentially separating chemicals from a mixture. And also sometimes, you have to quantify the amount of those chemicals.
KAREN FOLEY: And we've spoken today a lot about how students do science and do practical science. Is this something that we send students at home? Or how might students engage with this sort of technique?
NICK CHATTERTON: This sort of technique-- so in terms of the chemistry course, we have a practical, screen practical which involves real scientific data from research papers where essentially what they're doing is monitoring how different drugs are metabolised, OK? And that can be very important in terms of the safety applications of that kind of thing.
So what we do in that situation is we have a lab cast which is where some of us go into the lab and give a live broadcast to introduce the technique. And also there's a remote aspect to this experiment as well. So that you can connect, we've recently invested in some HPLC, which is more sophisticated than the type I'm going to show you today, type of chromatography experiment, which students can eventually remotely access and carry out this kind of technique themselves.
KAREN FOLEY: Brilliant. And we've looked at some of the remote aspects earlier. And a bit later in the programme today, we're going to go and look at how some people are setting up for one of those lab casts tonight. So are you going to show us then some chromatography and explain how it will happen?
NICK CHATTERTON: I sure am. So this is actually a demonstration we actually do in one of these lab casts. And this is really just to give us a sense of how the technique works. What we have here is a syringe, which I've plonked into the top of what's called an course SPE cartridge. The key thing about this stuff is that this is white solid column packing material, OK?
And that stuff that's going to do the work, OK? Before I do the actual separation-- because what we're actually going to be doing is separating-- we've got some food colouring just made of a mixture of two different food colours mixed together. We're going to separate into the two parts. But before we do that, what we have to do is actually prepare the column, which will take a few seconds. So I'm just going to run through the first solution. Actually, I should put my safety glasses on in a second. Because it hopefully won't, but it might go everywhere.
KAREN FOLEY: Absolutely. I love the way you haven't brought some for me and Claire. We'll be fine, Nick.
NICK CHATTERTON: It should be fine.
KAREN FOLEY: Should be fine.
CLAIRE TURNER: We're disposable, I think.
KAREN FOLEY: Yeah.
NICK CHATTERTON: So you see it's hopefully coming through. You push that stuff through. So that's the first one that goes through. And that's literally because the solid material is all packed together. And you've got to loosen it up. So we do that by running through two solvents to loosen up the packing material. And we're a bit careful. Try and keep it all-- take that out, get more air in, and then just push it through.
I think it will be more effective the second time. So I'll just do that again one more time, just pushing the solution through. And all I'm trying to do is open up the pores in the solid material such that the second material-- actually, the key one is this second liquid I'm going to pour through here. I won't get into the details.
But what it's going to do is add some sort of charge to the solid material which will help this separation. So I'll add a little bit of that. And it's basically the same again, three mils, try to make it not go everywhere. That's basically all I'm trying to do. Three mils, same idea-- this is basically just a bit like washing up liquid. So you might sometimes see it froth if you look carefully. I don't know if you've got a close one of this.
KAREN FOLEY: Yeah, we can see relatively close but not in too much detail.
NICK CHATTERTON: Push that through. So that's the first two. That's now the column prepared. And now, what I can do is add the food colouring, OK? And that's a mixture of two different food colours. And so I'll just do the same with that. A little bit better clamped. That's a bit loose. And three mils of that. And what we'll see here, what we're doing in the first stage is just try to concentrate onto the top of the column such that the separation is more effective.
So three mils of food colouring approximately, and then press down again, again. Do this slowly or as quickly as you wish. But slow is good sometimes. Try and break the airlock. And then push it onto the column material. So I hope you might be able to see that concentrating darker green colour at the top of the column.
KAREN FOLEY: It might be easier, Nick if you move, when you've finish that one, away from the green background.
NICK CHATTERTON: Oh yeah, sorry, that's good thinking. So just pushing it through. And then last but not least, do it one more time.
KAREN FOLEY: I guess a good thing as you're demonstrating this, because "add more air" might be a difficult instruction for students to do at home. But it's an important part of the process.
NICK CHATTERTON: It's an important part just, but just to push the stuff through, essentially. Although, that's what's going be pushing against the solution, pushing onto the solid material. So hopefully, you can now see you've got a material was packed onto the top of the column. And that's the green stuff. And what we're going to do essentially is separate our two-- we've got two solutions that I've prepared, hopefully labelled correctly, one and two.
The first one will separate-- so basically, they've got different compositions essentially. So this stuff is essentially stuck to the top of the column, OK? The mixture is stuck to the top of the column material. And what we'll do is push through these two liquids. And then the way the process works is that one of the two food colourings in this mixture will have a greater affinity for this one.
So it'll separate that out. You'll see hopefully that the first food colour comes off. So I'll just go ahead and do that. So we've got a solution one, again, approximately three mils, put it through. And then slowly but surely, you push that through. We should really switch these over.
So I will so we can collect the solution that we're interested in. Hopefully, if you can see, you're getting that nice separation at the bottom there. There's the blue colour, blue solution, is being pulled off. And the other stuff, which you may also be able to see the yellow stuff is staying attached to the column. So you can push that through really neatly. So we're separating the blue component the mixture yet leaving the yellow component behind.
KAREN FOLEY: We can see there's blue in the bottom as well.
NICK CHATTERTON: And the blue-- we're collecting recollecting-- hope we are. We're not at a 100% pure, but a purer version of the blue with very little of the yellow remaining. So I'll just finish off, just push the rest of that solution through, hopefully. Doesn't seem to be much there.
So let me give it a bit more air, just to get it off before I use the final solution. And then let's just keep going. It's coming off quite slowly. Let's just keep going, collect the rest of the blue. And that will be good. So hopefully, you can now see that most of the blue-- virtually all of the blue has come off.
And the yellow remains stuck to the column. So what we're not going to do is change the solution again to solution number two and use that to pull off the yellow. And what we've essentially done through this whole process is separate the yellow from the blue food dye. Let's just finish this off. Hopefully, this is indeed the right mixture.
KAREN FOLEY: Now, while you're doing that, Nick, Claire, I wonder if you could tell us how this links to research.
CLAIRE TURNER: So chromatography is one of the really fundamental techniques in much of scientific research. Because when you have a whole pile of different compounds all together, as you often will do, you do need to separate them before you can actually analyse them. So the kind of research that I do is I'm interested in diagnosing disease actually non-invasively.
And I pretty much want to do this by trying to find biomarkers for particular diseases. And the thing with that is, if you take a sample from a human-- so if you take a sample of urine, or blood, or any of those things, as you can imagine, they have got lots and lots of things in them.
So if you want to try and pick out what those biomarkers are, which actually indicate what the disease is and what have you, you really do need to separate them. So chromatography is as absolutely a key technique to use to do that. And it goes across all sorts of different areas. Now, Nick's just really very nicely demonstrated that. Because you can see the yellow has come out very clearly.
NICK CHATTERTON: Yeah, see? Yellow.
CLAIRE TURNER: So he's very nicely demonstrated that you've got to--
KAREN FOLEY: You can put them on the table. We should all be able to see them against the white tablecloth.
CLAIRE TURNER: You can separate two compounds. But in actual fact, in some of the techniques which are a lot more bigger and expensive and what have you, but they can actually separate thousands of compounds in a sample. So this becomes a very, very powerful technique. And as you separate each compound, as each compound comes off, you can analyse it. So the analysis techniques-- much easier to analyse a compound if it's one compound rather than thousands of them.
KAREN FOLEY: And this is something that students will be at level three in the lab casts?
NICK CHATTERTON: Absolutely, in terms of that this is to introduce the phenomenon that they're going to use to analyse and the more sophisticated, as Claire's mentioned, types of instrument that we've actually been using, just so they understand how the solvent plays a role, the solution plays a role. Because they're basically interactions between the solvent molecules that I pushed through and the dye that's giving rise to separation. So you need to understand a little bit about how that phenomenon works. So we just demonstrate it using this type of demonstration.
KAREN FOLEY: Excellent. Well, thank you both so much for coming and showing us that. It's been absolutely excellent. So Nick and Claire, thank you.
CLAIRE TURNER: Thank you very much.
KAREN FOLEY: While we're preparing for our next session, let's just take a quick trip to the Hot Desk where we have Eleanor who is from the Life Health Science-- see, I'm going to get it wrong now. But I'm going to say it, Life, Health, and Chemical Sciences team. And she is joined by Sarah on the Hot Desk. How is everyone back at home? I imagine everyone was watching that quite avidly.
ELEANOR: Yeah, very interesting conversations with some of the students. So there's discussions about S111, which is the first module within the science. They actually do quite a lot of kitchen chemistry. And one of the experiments they do there is separating the marker pens using like coffee filter papers. There's been a discussion about that, which I think has also taken some people back to their school days when they'd done something quite similar.
KAREN FOLEY: So we've talked a bit about kitchen science as well and how that's integrated. And there are some quite interesting experiments as well in S111, aren't there, that people can do at home.
ELEANOR: Well, Nick would have been the ideal person to talk about that. Because he's actually only on the 111 module team. So he would know about all the different types of experiments that there are on the module. Yeah, so a whole range-- I think they'd be right across the-- because S111 covers all the different sciences, there is a whole range of different experiments there.
KAREN FOLEY: Brilliant. And Sarah, how is everyone back home? Everyone thinking about afternoon tea yet?
SARAH: No. We've had no conversations about cake or anything. I'm quite disappointed.
ELEANOR: We've got discussions about gin and tonic things, haven't we?
KAREN FOLEY: Oh, who's that? Because I was talking about gin and tonic yesterday.
ELEANOR: Well, we had a discussion. Somebody was talking about kitchen science. And they were talking about-- I think Davin was talking about making pigs in blankets, toad in the hole.
SARAH: It's started now. The baking's all coming through.
ELENOR: And someone was wondering if you could do experiments like this to separate gin from tonic.
KAREN FOLEY: You should never separate gin from tonic. I think it's a very bad idea.
ELEANOR: And Carol's just fed in here from S111--- was one very successful experiment that she had was to extract DNA from kiwi fruit.
KAREN FOLEY: Yes, I've heard that was a good one
ELEANOR: I should leave that for your next--
KAREN FOLEY: Brilliant. Well, thank you very much. Lynda Cook who has returned today, what have you been doing out on campus today, Lynda? You came in for our introduction earlier.
LYNDA COOKE: I did. Well, we've been checking to make sure we got everything ready for this session this afternoon. So yeah, it's quite an exciting day.
KAREN FOLEY: And welcome Martin Bootman to the session as well. Now, you're going to show us a reality app which is really exciting and completely different to what we were looking at earlier. This is about the human heart.
LYNDA COOKE: It is. So our introductory to the second level module called Human Biology for biology or health students-- one of the topics is cardiovascular physiology. And of course, the heart is a key component of the cardiovascular system. And it's really important. The heart beats from 16 days post fertilisation right through our life all the time. To understand how that structure is related to the function, we can use various things like diagrams. Or we can use models like we've got here as well. But how our students actually get to grips with it-- we can get them to label things and things like that. But actually using a reality app like we've got here, they can actually see it moving. And they can interact with it and learn how the structure is related to its function.
KAREN FOLEY: It saves all the mess of dissection as well, which I was never very keen on.
LYNDA COOKE: So I don't know that I can show this on camera or not.
KAREN FOLEY: So if you just hold it up so that we can take a look at this-- so this is the app. And we're going to share it on the screen as well to take a look.
LYNDA COOKE: Right. So this is available to-- it's actually available to anyybody on Google and Android as well. It's called SK277 Heart App. And what happens, you download it. You can download it as a desktop version or as a tablet version as is shown here. And you can rotate it around.
OK, so it's an anatomically accurate model. And we have a menu that comes up here. And we can do various things. So we can open the heart up. So we can actually see inside it. If we get rid of the menu, you can see that a bit more clearly. OK, so you can see the two upper chambers. And you can see the two lower chambers.
OK, so that's quite similar to what students use in the diagram. But what we can also do is we can actually play the heart as well. And we can get rid of that. And students can do this. They can do that at their own pace. And we can guide them in the module materials with certain questions to make them investigate aspects of the heart and how it functions.
OK, so you mentioned about dissection. Well, we can have some pins, dissection pins. So if I just stop the heart beating so you can see this a little bit more clearly and get rid of that, then you press the pin. And it comes up there with the label. So what's really important to understand about heart function is the coordinated contraction of the upper chambers moving blood flow into the lower chambers and ejection. And that's got to happen all the time to keep us alive.
Now, we can also show blood flow as well. So let's get rid of that. So students can do that. And they can turn the app around. Let me just make it a little bit smaller. They can see the valves closing, opening, OK? And they can also link that, as I say, to important biological processes and physiological processes that are going on.
So we have here what's called the cardiac cycle. And if I just move this along here-- whoops. I'll do this so you can see it-- Yeah, I'm doing it wrong, OK. So it's really important that students grasp what's called the cardiac cycle. That's each heartbeat, what is taking place. And it's actually quite complex.
So this gives a really good opportunity for students to gain a lot more from a stationary diagram. They can really get into the function of the heart and look at it and, as I say, doing it at their own level. And we give them learning opportunities to engage with this so that they can develop their own learning.
KAREN FOLEY: What an amazing way of studying. Because so often-- I mean, you can have models. You can read about things in textbooks. But one of the things that I often find my students struggle with in terms of biology is that you'll read a certain thing, and then read a certain similar thing but from a different perspective or looking at a different plane.
And it can make it really hard to put things together, to conceptualise them, especially when you've got text and diagrams. And we have a lot of images and multimedia things that can really help conceptualise. But this is really different. And being able to control it and look around creates just something so unique. I can't believe it's free to everybody.
LYNDA COOKE: It is, yeah. And we've got Paul Hogan from our KMI developed this. And as I say, it's available on the App Store and on Google for Android as well.
KAREN FOLEY: KMI, our Knowledge Media Institute who develop all sorts of fabulous things, including the stadium live interface.
LYNDA COOKE: So as I say, we have activities that students engage with this. And then that's part of their assessment as well. So we make sure that they can test their understanding.
KAREN FOLEY: OK, so what sorts of things would students be doing then from looking at this? These are the activities within the module. In which module is that?
LYNDA COOKE: So this is SK299, which is Human Biology. And we would ask them to actually be able to understand the cardiac cycle, all the components of the cardiac cycle which you saw in that quite complex graph that was shown on there. And this would enable them to do that. And actually, it links to our research in terms of understanding a cardiac cycle, how each cardiac cycle takes place, links through each heartbeat, and how it functions.
KAREN FOLEY: Excellent. Did you want to show us anything on the monitor as well?
MARTIN BOOTMAN: Yes.
KAREN FOLEY: So have we covered most of the functions?
MARTIN BOOTMAN: So actually, Lynda's mentioned the cardiac cycle a couple of times. And the cardiac cycle is driven by the generation of electrical signals within the heart which the app nicely shows. And we've had longstanding expertise in cardiovascular biology here at the Open University.
And indeed, we develop assets like this, but also movies that you alluded to earlier. And one of the things we've been trying to understand for many years is this cardiac cycle and what happens when it goes wrong. And what we've brought with us today is a couple of movies to show you this cardiac cycle as it functions in beating cells. If I play this movie-- let me just go back and find the mouse. Here we go. And I'll just play this. Now, what you can see here-- I'll just get rid of the mouse if it's playing on the screen, is it going to play?
KAREN FOLEY: I think it might have paused. You might need to hover and press the Play button again.
MARTIN BOOTMAN: OK, let me try that again. There we go. So what you can see here is a single beating heart cell. And the changing colour that you can see is actually a surge of calcium within the cell. So the heart relies on electrical signals to coordinate its beating. So it operates like a pump. It's a very strong muscular pump.
But when those electrical signals reach each individual cardiac myocyte, as we call the heart cells, what happens is that there's a surge in their calcium concentration. And that surge in calcium concentration causes them to contract. And you can see that cell contracting just from that edge moving in. And of course, that's a nice rhythmic pattern. That's what you want. That's about the speed that most human hearts go. Mine's going a little faster right now.
But sometimes, it goes wrong. And this is an example of when it goes wrong. What you can see here in this case is two heart cells beating away. I'll just wait for that to load up and try that again. You can see two of the heart cells here. OK, and they're beating away. And the top cell stays faithful to the rhythm that we want.
There's an electrical signal imposed on it. But the bottom cell starts to do its own thing. And you can see it started to skip beats. And eventually, about now, it stops beating at all. And it stops showing those calcium signals. And a long time now, we've been trying to investigate what causes that change.
Why does it go from a rhythmic pattern which you need for the heart to act as a coordinated pump to squish the blood to the lungs or to the body? Why does the heart fail? And one of the things that we know that we have studied for some time is that the heart cells are this precisely geometrically aligned cell type.
You can see here this is an image of a heart cell. And what we're showing here in this image is one particular protein that's expressed inside heart cells. It's called ryanodine receptors, which is part of this calcium signalling machinery. And you can see these are beautifully striated cells. We call these line patterns striations.
But as we age, things change. And here at the Open University, we've got fantastic electron microscopy suites. And we can look at the ultra structure of these cells and see what happens as we age. On the left, you can see just a small representation from a healthy heart cell, from a young heart cell.
And you can see these beautiful striations again. And this is how the cells need to be set up so that they can contract maximally and our hearts can work really nicely. On the right-hand side, you can see a representation from an old heart cell. And it looks completely different. We don't fully understand that change.
But we know when that change happens, the heart isn't going to be such an effective pump. And we're going to be poorly. And that's what we're researching right now. And we use our expertise to feed back into courses such as 299 to make sure that we're informing students about really cutting edge results and experiments.
KAREN FOLEY: We've talked about how a lot of the curriculum extends beyond the curriculum and research students. And you say, "We're researching." Who? And what opportunities might there be for students in the future to do important work like this?
MARTIN BOOTMAN: Well, indeed, these particular images here were actually obtained by PhD student in my lab, Saied. And he's just actually finished his PhD. He was very successful and had a very enjoyable viva. And he did actually spend his three years doing research with us, investigating the changes that happened in the heart during ageing, which is extremely topical.
We have an ageing population as you know. We need to know why do people's hearts become less effective as they age. Why do they develop symptoms such as hypertrophy, and arrhythmias, and things like that? So we have lots of opportunities. As well as PhD students, we try to get our undergraduate students involved as much as we can. We have internships. We have a lot of visitors that come in.
And we're very keen to disseminate our research expertise. We go to conferences. We publish a lot of papers. And we do engage where we can. And certainly, we have a conference next week, in fact, actually dealing with some of these issues. And that's going to be available on Stadium. And we really want our students to feel part of our research community and to understand the research we're doing.
KAREN FOLEY: And where can students find out about that?
MARTIN BOOTMAN: So that's available on Stadium web page and also on the QUALS website for science--
LYNDA COOKE: On the science study website.
KAREN FOLEY: Brilliant. But if you are interested and you drop us an email, then we can always email you the exact link a little bit later this evening. Well, that's so interesting. These PhDs then, I mean, it seems like a real area of concern. Are a lot of these predefined and students will apply to, for example, pick up a specific topic that the team are researching? Or can students come in with their own ideas and say, "This is something. Could the university consider letting me do a PhD here?"
MARTIN BOOTMAN: It's always a bit of a mix actually. And very often, we have students that have been really engaged with a topic during their undergraduate study or perhaps masterS study. And they come along and they have a real passion. And when somebody has a passion, then you've got that motivation that you need to see something like a PhD through successfully. But we also have lots and lots of projects that we want to undertake.
So we're very keen for anybody who thinks that research and understanding making fundamental discoveries-- and it can be quite taxing. I mean, Lynda and I have both gone through PhDs some years ago. And we know that experiments don't always work. And we think we understand how cells behave.
But they have a habit of being much cleverer than we are and understanding-- yknow, we have a lack of understanding of things that sometimes we think we've got to grips with. And that's why research takes such a long time. That's why the development of pharmacology and new therapeutics takes such a long time. Because cells are actually incredibly complex computing machines.
KAREN FOLEY: And of course, the environment's changing. Because as you say, with an ageing population, there are different things that are being thrown up all the time. And so it's continuously relevant and evolving.
MARTIN BOOTMAN: Absolutely. So yes, I mean, the missions from research councils and from funding bodies change over time. Ageing is extremely topical right now and will continue to be as our population does age. But of course, there's an enormous emphasis on conditions such as asthma, and hypertension, and obesity, and diabetes. These are very important societal issues right now. And there's a lot of funding. And new challenges will arise.
KAREN FOLEY: Excellent. Well, thank you so much for coming along today. It's been incredibly interesting. I just want to take a quick trip to the Hot Desk, Eleanor, anything else that we need to mention before we end the session?
ELEANOR: I think there was some discussion about where we might find the app. So it was emphasising that's on the open STEM labs website. And I'm just checking. I think that it is available to everybody. I think Lynda said that. Yeah, so it's available to everybody. I think that was one of the main discussions other than the fact that gin is rumbling on. And there's some nice recipes on there as well for people to enjoy over Christmas.
KAREN FOLEY: I shall look forward to catching up on those later. Well done everybody at home. OK, well, thank you very much for staying and chatting with us. We're going to take a short video break and show you about the MSC in Mental Health. And then we're going to meet more researchers where we're going to look at waste management, recycling, and plastics. So join me then in five minutes.
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