Sentinus Team R&D Gold Crest Award

A group of four A-Level Applied Science students recently won Gold Crest Awards for taking part in this years Sentinus R&D Team challenge.  Working with our partners in industry, Andor Technology, the girls were set the task of designing a microscope stage that would hold a leaf in place while still attached to the plant.

Quite often biologists need to look at the physiology inside the living cells of a leaf. Cutting sections from the plant is not an option as this would obviously affect the very process that they were trying to investigate.  Even the use of the spring clips normally used to hold a slide in place would cause the plant too much stress and adversely affect results.  The pupils came up with a solution which involved using a vacuum to hold the leaf in place.  The project required the students to look at scientific and technical theory including conformal microscopy, fluorescence in leaf cell biology and the use of CAD software and laser cutting in the design process.