Kew Gardens PAFTOL Project Competition Winners!

By Daniel Booker 12-E

When Mrs Chehade told us that we were changing our lesson plans and entering a national competition, I was rather intrigued. The Royal Botanic Gardens Kew holds a variety of Endeavour Competition Challenges each year, aimed at different age groups to expand their scientific knowledge and get young people interested in the natural world. The best submissions win £1000 for the school! Prize money? Now we’re talking. All the Year 12 biology students took part, each class creating their own entry. The biology teachers then judged the entries from every class and selected one class’s entry to be the school’s submission.

I was put in charge of managing the three facets of our overall submission – a write-up of our experiment to extract DNA from strawberries, a report on the PAFTOL project, and an overview of DNA sequencing techniques – making sure it was cohesive and flowed seamlessly together. To manage this, I separated the class evenly into three teams based on what they were most interested in writing about, then further subdivided the workload for each section among team members to maximise inclusion and engagement. Those working on the experiment write-up shared tasks such as recording our method, evaluating its advantages and limitations for extracting strawberry DNA and exploring the science behind each step of our method.  Another team wrote about the PAFTOL project which, led by Kew Gardens, is mapping the evolutionary relationships of all plant and fungal genera using genomic data to build a comprehensive Tree of Life, involving over 300 scientists from 117 institutions across 21 countries! Personally, I was intrigued by the policy of open science upheld by the PAFTOL project, demonstrating unparalleled levels of accessibility and transparency in how it managed its data so that everybody could make the most of its pioneering research. Finally, the DNA sequencing team discovered just what a vast variety of different DNA sequencing methods have been developed in recent decades, each trying to improve on the last. We learnt that companies such as 23andMe can use specific base pairs in your genome called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) to tell you everything from your ancestry to your risk of certain diseases! Working together in class made it easy to share ideas/ask each other questions, so everyone’s individual tasks were their best work before being carefully woven together into the final submission, as well as fostering excellent team spirit!

While this experience taught me a lot about DNA sequencing and its uses such as in the PAFTOL project, it equally enhanced valuable teamwork and leadership skills that came to the fore when organising the collation of everyone’s work into our final submission. I was delighted to discover that our hard work payed off and our class’s entry was selected by the teachers to be our school’s submission to the Endeavour Challenge judges. Amazingly, we learnt shortly after that we had won the £1000 prize for the SGS Biology department! Thanks of course to Mrs Chehade for organising this wonderful opportunity and to all the biology teachers on behalf of the Year 12 biology students for their continued support. You are most welcome for the prize money, and I am grateful for the personal statement material! I hope to see the younger years following in our victorious footsteps.