An international students’ day at EMBL
Guest article by Nefely Aikaterini Taravira
Young students from all over the world meet at EMBL to discover the fascinating world of science.
As I’m arriving at the EMBL in Heidelberg, young voices and laughter come from the Advanced Training Centre (ATC) building. Today, EMBL is hosting the International Summer Science School Heidelberg (ISH). Twenty two young students from Australia, Japan, USA, Ukraine, France, UK and Germany – from the sister cities and partner organizations of Heidelberg – will have the chance to spend four weeks packed with science in some of Heidelberg’s most famous research institutes, including EMBL.
The programme, which is organised by the city of Heidelberg for the 22nd time this year, provides a unique experience to international students. “In this time the students will not only get a hands-on experience in science but also form long-lasting friendships and have fun”, former participants, now ISH aids, tell me. As part of their first week introductory workshops, they visited EMBL today. Throughout the workshop, the staff of the European Learning Laboratory for the Life Sciences (ELLS) and collaborating EMBL scientists to made the students familiar with the topic of the day, X-ray crystallography.
As a young student myself, doing a summer internship with ELLS, I found the idea of the ISH intriguing and was particularly excited about preparing and participating in today’s experiment: protein crystallization.
The day started with a get-to-know-EMBL presentation. Six sites, 23 member states, 1600 people from over 80 countries, all part of the EMBL family! Next, we listened to the presentation from Jakub Macošek – a doctoral student of the Hennig lab – who smoothly introduced us to protein structure and function, to conclude with the basic method of X-ray crystallography of proteins. “The way that the crystal of our protein of interest scatters when struck by X-rays reveals its structure and therefore enhances our understanding of protein function, something that cannot be done by a light microscope and is of great importance to medicine”, Jakub emphasises. Proteins, when put in the right conditions – which can be really difficult to discover as I figured out later – are arranged in a three-dimensional order and form crystals. This will be the up-coming experiment, the highlight of the day.
As soon as it was time to put lab coats and gloves on, with their eyes wide open, all students listened to the instructions and couldn’t wait to start pipetting themselves. Most of us had some lab experience and with the help of the starter kit we had been given, we greased the plates, pipetted the reservoir solution and the crystallization drop, covered the plates carefully and let them incubate. Our very own lysozyme crystals would hopefully grow in the solution soon! Setting up the experiment demanded our concentration and quick thinking, but didn’t stop anyone from enjoying the chance to become a scientist, even if only for a little while.
After lunch, Dr. Kim Remans, Head of the EMBL Protein Expression and Purification Core Facility, talked to us about the lab methods needed in order to express and purify proteins – her lab’s “job”. We then walked cheerfully through the heavy rain, to pay a visit to the lab itself. Flasks of bacteria shaking, gels running, Western blots incubating, columns purifying proteins, robots distributing solutions – we had the chance to see it all – we even visited the cold room. There is a huge difference between hearing something and experiencing it yourself! I could see that the ISH students agreed. “A real tour through the scientists’ world” a student confided.
In the meantime, our crystals were growing and even though they needed 20 hours to reach their full size, some baby crystals had already started forming. Everyone got the chance to see their team’s results through the microscope, document every detail in the results analysis sheet and compare it with a test experiment that was done the previous day. With the right tools we also fished crystals from the growth solution, the technique of crystal mounting as it is usually called. We were overjoyed. “You should come quickly, I think we’ve made a discovery!” some students shouted. In their plates appeared different, bigger crystals. Unfortunately, they turned out to be only the edges of the plate.
The day at EMBL ended with a tour around the ATC building and a wrap-up of the day. Every student was satisfied with today’s activities and looked forward to continuing the ISH experience. “I’m really happy to be a part of the ISH programme, there is a lot that I can learn. I’m excited about doing very specific research at the Max Planck Institute the following three weeks”, one of the students exclaims. Another participant added “I will be spending the other three weeks at EMBL and I’m really enthusiastic about it, today was a great start. In the following weeks, I expect to go deeper onto what we’ve started and at the same time get to know more about the city of Heidelberg”. Undoubtedly, the hands-on experiment was everyone’s favourite of the day. “The crystals under the microscope looked pretty cool because I’ve never seen anything like this before and I didn’t know about the method until today. Now we got to do it ourselves!”, a student said.
The International Summer Science School of Heidelberg 2017 is off to a great start!
