By Jackie Alexander
Staff writer, Gainesville Sun
Staff writer, Gainesville Sun
Some of the projects at the Alachua Regional Science and Engineering Fair make Bill Nye the Science Guy look like an amateur.
More than 200 students explained their projects Friday to 100 judges in the Santa Fe College gym. Projects ranged from soccer and cosines to Alzheimer's disease research.
Sarah Charbonnet, the science fair organizer, said the students work hard to show projects with real scientific merit.
“They've done some real valid research and put their knowledge to use,” she said.
That includes research done by Dipa Bose, 13, on Alzheimer's disease. Dipa said her family has a history of the disease and that she studied the efficacy of two different medicines in her father's lab.
Bose said she started over the summer, learning how to process DNA from her father.
“I worked alongside him, and he taught me all the techniques,” she said.
The eighth-grader said she worked with DNA strands and then expressed them in kidney and brain cells. She said she discovered that kidney cells have a way of killing the protein that causes Alzheimer's disease.
“I want to find out what enzyme or catalyst is able to dispose of this neurotoxic protein,” she said.
School Board vice chair April Griffin attended the event.
“It's really impressive,” she said. “We have some great kids and awesome teachers.”
Joni Perkins, an eighth-grader at Mebane Middle School, extracted DNA from fruit to determine which fruit would have more DNA.
“I like doing experiments on fruit,” she said.
Bananas was the answer because of their thin phospholipid layer, Perkins said.
With so many judges around, it's easy to get nervous, Perkins said.
“You do get nervous, but you try not to let it show,” she said. She said she hopes to become a lawyer.
David Liu, 15, said he found a simple chemical compound that reduces the number of pancreatic cancer cells by 70 percent.
“I think it's a new drug for potential clinical trials,” he said.
David, a sophomore at Eastside High School, said he hopes to become a biomedical engineer.
Jacob Reynolds, an eighth-grade student at Oak View Middle, built a program for a computer tic-tac-toe game.
“I tried to make it unbeatable, but it isn't,” he said. The program tied 91 times, won eight games and lost once.
Other projects included the best file format for digital photographs, a look at whether pools could cause sinkholes and a method for removing oil from oil spills.
Watching students enjoy science keeps dentist and judge Jeff Smith coming back.
“This sets the seeds for a lot of our youth,” Smith said.
The winners of the regional science fair will be announced Monday at Lincoln Middle School. Thirty students will move on to the state science fair.
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