The traditional nation-wide event Scientists’ Night, this year on the topic of “MYSTERIES”, introduced visitors to the new City Campus of the University of Ostrava. The selected stands of the Faculty of Science were placed in a darkened tent – including the stand of the biophysics group. Because of the darkened environment we were able to offer visitors visually attractive experiments in the form of examples of fluorescent materials from everyday life and those used in plant biophysics research, including an illustrative example of a naturally red fluorescent extract of the photosynthetic pigment chlorophyll and then the popular model plant of the Arabidopsis thaliana itself. Furthermore, at our booth you could observe the mysterious images of polarized microscopy, where you could observe crystals of naturally optically active sugar that form colored structures in polarized light, as well as images of various plant tissues observed using fluorescence microscopy, where naturally fluorescent chloroplasts were visible, as well as other cellular and sub-cellular parts that were made visible by adding special fluorescent substances.
According to the interest of the visitors, we fulfilled this year’s Night of Scientists theme and passed on a bit of that scientific curiosity not only to adult visitors, but also to the youngest ones. We look forward to seeing you again next year with a brand new theme!
