The innovative project from New Brunswick in this year’s national SABC final shows how carbon emissions from potatoes can be used to increase the growth of cyanobacteria (aka ‘pond scum’), the oil in which is a biofuel.

For Lee Nicholas, 17, there never was a time when the three R’s of reduce, reuse, recycle, weren’t a part of his natural way of thinking. He was raised in a First Nations environment that stressed harmony with the world. Sarah Sullivan, 17, Lee’s partner on the project, also came to the project with a strong personal interest: both sides of her family have farmed potatoes and she has worked on the land since she was 13.

Not only were the Grade 11 students at Southern Victoria High School in Perth-Andover keen to do real science with an accredited mentor, they were excited to work on something that could make a real impact on their community and many others.

Perth-Andover is the world’s french-fry capital, with hundreds of tons of potatoes in storage barns waiting to be processed at any one time. Stored potatoes emit CO2, which can quickly degrade them and so typically is vented outside.

Sarah and Lee essentially fertilized cyanobacteria using CO2-rich air from sealed containers of potatoes and measured their results against a control. “It was awesome,” says Sarah, “the amount of cyanobacteria doubled in some cases.”

The project holds special interest for mentor David Wattie, a potato pest specialist with New Brunswick’s Department of Agriculture and Aquaculture.

“It’s well established that cyanobacteria need CO2 to live, but nobody has tried to use the CO2 given off by stored potatoes to see if it had any effect on it,” he says.

It’s too early to say definitively that vented CO2 from potato bins can be used to grow cyanobacteria on a commercial scale or even that pond scum is a viable biofuel.

Right now it is enough to say that Sarah and Lee have contributed to those possibilities. And both say they now consider bioscience a viable career option due to the SABC experience.

Fredericton student creates new method to study health risks of chemicals

Bisphenol A (BPA), a synthetic chemical additive found in plastic products, has been much in news when Canada became the first country to ban the chemical in baby bottles last year. Found in such everyday products as plastic water bottles, its possible health effects are under scrutiny.

And for this year’s SABC competition in New Brunswick, 17-year-old Yoojin Kim took up the issue and demonstrated the effects of BPA on the mortality and reproduction of fruit flies.

Of note as well, the methods used in Yoojin’s research may also lead to a new, more cost-effective way to screen potentially toxic chemicals.

BPA is used to make a hard, clear plastic known as polycarbonate and little is known about precisely how it affects living creatures. Since fruit flies are well-known experimental subjects and share about 75% of their genes with humans, Yoojin decided to test the affects of BPA on them.

She discovered that the chemical not only killed more fruit flies, it also reduced the number of eggs that hatch.

Mentor Denise Clark of the University of New Brunswick comments: “Yoojin’s was very tenacious at learning difficult genetics concepts and would keep at it until she had mastered them.”

The Grade 12 student said her biggest challenge in the lab was counting the eggs that were laid by fruit flies because they’re so small. “And it was hard for me at first to distinguish between male flies and female flies,” she said.

After participating in SABC, Yoojin said she now realizes that biotechnology is “a vast area of study with a lot of job opportunities”.