The Food Quality Of Our School

Greetings fellow friends! We are Wissenschaft from Hin Hua High School. For your information, Wissenschaft means "science" in German. We are a team of friends committed and passionate for science, hence the name. This year we decided to conduct an experiment on the food quality of our school.

Our school has a mere 1 acre of space, but with about 2900 students and over 200 teachers and workers. In this limited area of activity, we rely on our food canteen very much. One day, one of us had a lightbulb when eating our canteen's food. "Is my food I'm eating safe?" We all agreed that this is a very serious and important theme, so we decided to do an experiment under the guidance of OLIPRO BIOTECHNOLOGY SDN BHD on the food quality of our school.

So these are the steps we went through during the experiment. First we collected food samples from different stalls in our school. Next there is bacteria enrichment for 18 hours in LB broth(some scientific stuff that makes bacteria grow alot.) After that, we extract their DNA using boiling method.(boil the stuff, centrifuge it, cool it, DESTROY THE NUCLEUS MEMBRANE AND CELL MEMBRANE!!!)

Then we went through PCR (a technique that amplifies the DNA copies to billions of them). Next we conducted gel electrophoresis in 2% of agarose gel(another scientific thingy)to check the PCR products. At last, we went through hybridization using something called microarray (they have probes and nylon membranes on it so they can detect specific DNA copies cuz DNA is negative charged and nylon membranes are positively charged so they stick with each other XD). Last but not least, we analyse all the data and gathered sufficient information to "sue" our school.

We collected 8 food samples, and 2 of them show positive results for bacillus cereus(some bacteria that can make you VERY VERY uncomfortable). Which also means that our food is NOT SAFE! OMG!

How does microarray work? Microarray is a multiple lapse-on gene chip. This is the microarray chip:

(P/S: they are the product of OLIPRO Biotechnology.) It can detect 9 kinds of bacteria commonly found in contaminated food. They are
1.Staphylococcus Aureus
2.Bacillus Cereus
3.Vibrio cholerae
4.Salmonella spp (subspecies)
5.Shigella spp
6.Listeria monocytogenes
7.Vibrio parahaemolyticus
8.Escherichia Coli 0157:H7
9.Campylobacter spp

Anyway, even though this is a very challenging and complicated experiment and requires a lot of skill, we still managed to do the experiments BY OURSELVES and the guidance of our beloved scientist in the company, Ms Thena. The company provide us every material needed for our experiment TOTALLY FREE! We really really appreciate their support. Thank you OLIPRO!

Is this the end? NO! Why would the food be contaminated in the first place? Would water be one of the contamination factors? We thought so, so we did the same experiment on water to check the water quality. We collected our school canteen water, toilet tap water, drain water, rain water, Diamond filtered water, and distilled water. After gel electrophoresis, we found out that the canteen water, drain water, rain water and diamond filtered water has the most bacteria, and the toilet tap water has the least bacteria.

Then we went through hybridization again. SURPRISINGLY, we found out that the toilet tap water has Staphylococcus Aureaus, which is number one on the list at the top. Then we found that our school canteen water, drain water and rain water contains Bacillus Cereus. This proves that again, our school's water IS CONTAMINATED.

But how about the others? The Diamond water? Are they safe? Not really. To find out more about that, a further study is essentially required. By using RT PCR, which is a kind of semi-quantitative method and can simultaneously calculate the number of bacteria DNA, we might be able to solve the problem. Stay tuned.

That's all for our project for this year. As we said, all is not over. We've talked to our board of directors and our headmistress, and they are treating this very seriously. There have been talks on how to solve this problem and they are currently taking place. Our job is not over, even though FLL is over. Again, stay tuned, and thank you.