This year we were delighted to take part in the Forsche Schüler Tag/Boys’ and Girls’ Day by introducing five interested ninth graders (15-16 years old) to the exciting world of systems biology.
In collaboration with Simranpreet Kaur and Clara Kraus from the Jena Microbial Resource Collection of the Leibniz-HKI, our students explored hands-on experiments on fungal phagocytosis by macrophages and neutrophils, including microscopic imaging of these processes, giving them an insight into real laboratory work.
In our part, Marius Wank and Zoltán Cseresnyés first demonstrated how JIPipe can be used to process and analyse microscopy data, providing an interesting insight into image analysis workflows. Karoline Schied, Simone Piccioni, Philipp Städter and Jana Wilms then took the lead in explaining how this data can be used to create mathematical models to investigate biological questions, and presented several other fascinating real-world applications of mathematical models.