Involve Involve - June 1, 2015 | Page 3

What’s Going On - In the Classroom PRINCIPLES OF ENGINEERING Mr. Kahler Students built a one-string guitar and learned basic component circuitry. They were trained on how to solder and are currently building an operational amplifier for their guitar. Next week they’ll be building functioning speakers. PLTW MEDICAL INTERVENTIONS & BIOMEDICAL INNOVATIONS Mr. Arnholt PLTW has been ending the year with some fantastic labs on bio-engineering. Medical interventions used columns to separate out different proteins produced by E.coli. The protein of interest is GFP, a glowing florescent protein that they made the bacteria produce through a bacterial transformation. They will be doing analysis of these products with a vertical gel electrophoresis to look at their molecular weights to determine the protein sizes. In Biomedical innovation, students took a gene (Kan r) and put it into a ring of DNA called a plasmid. The gel shown shows all of the different ways this gene could be inserted into the plasmid and the conformational differences between the products. Next, students will get bacteria to use the plasmid to give them antibiotic resistance. 3