Regent House Pupils Explore Plants and Virology
Regent House biologists spent time recently with Dr David Courtney, senior lecturer in the School of Medicine, Dentistry and Biomedical Sciences and leading expert on influenza A virus at Queen’s University Belfast.
Dr Courtney is the STEM Partner on a Royal Society funded project to allow pupils to carry out RTPCR diagnostics on the detection of cucumber mosaic virus in the Biology Department at Regent House. Careers in plant science can often be overlooked but the project allows pupils to carry out similar diagnostics to those used to detect human pathogens such as coronaviruses and pupils explored the importance of plant disease and the effect it might have on food security.
The legacy provided by this Royal Society project and an earlier project have provided the Biology Department with a PCR machine and all the equipment needed to complete nucleic acid extractions and agarose gel electrophoresis, all important topics on the A Level specification.