I'm giving a presentation! Looking for ideas

[Abrahm]

As part of my work related goals for the year I need to create and give a presentation on something science related. I've chosen to make mine amphibian related but I'm looking for a good angle to use. We're generally an analytical laboratory with a wide variety of equipment but our bioanalytical group is quite small so discussions of techniques in these areas are definitely a good plan as it should be reasonably new material for the whole audience.

So, I'm throwing this out for the general populace. What will give me a chance to talk about amphibians and give me an opportunity to talk about standard or cutting edge tests? My audience is generally bachelors of chemistry with a general public exposure to amphibians. Past presentations were on such topics as headspace gas chromatography, and BCA (Bureau of Criminal Apprehension) procedures and specifically hair identification.

At the moment I'm thinking of talking about Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis and detection methods in frogs (PCR, histology, etc.). I'd like to hear other ideas or expansions on this one.

 

[darwinthesun]

Hmmm, well I don't know anything about you or what you do (since I am new) so take my suggestions with a grain of salt. I also don't work in industry, so presentations outside of your own research are foreign to me. I suppose you are presenting a synopsis of other peoples research?

As for amphibian detection, there have been a few recent papers that describe how to detect unknown species in an area. One very cool paper outlined a method using PCR and pond water to determine which amphibians were utilizing the pond. They had very interesting results, as they found many more species than were originally thought to use the pond (by dip nets and seines).

 

[Azhael]

I think Abrahm was refering to detecting the disease in amphibians.
Chytrid is indeed a very good topic.

I don´t know if this will interest you, but i once did an article about caudate pigments for one of my classes, and found it very interesting. I´m sure there is plenty of cutting-edge machinery that can be used for isolation, identification and understanding of the pigments.

 

[Darkmaverick]

How about detection and differentiation of genetic diseases/ colour variants/ genus similarity by means of using microarray for genomic scanning and then honing in with RT-PCR to amplify gene segment of interest. Thereafter, checking if transciption = translation by using immunohistochemistry techniques to stain specific proteins. That way you can still use amphibians as a model but promote the use of these techniques.

 

[Abrahm]

@darwinthesun They can use PCR to detect amphibian species just by analyzing pond water? That's really, really awesome! Since I have actual experience with PCR that might be a great idea for me.

@Azhael that sounds really interesting. Maybe you can send me the paper, I'm sure it would be a good one to peruse just for fun.

@Darkmaverick Oh! Neat stuff! I love microarrays and that sounds really interesting. Unfortunately my school never had the funds to actually have anyone run a microarray. We did utilize most of the common model organisms (Arabidopsis and Xenopus), but still they are wildly expensive