XVI International Botanical Congess

Limited funding for science education must not be an excuse for allowing young people to become bored during science classes. Exciting plant science and molecular biology can be done by training teachers: to use safe, carefully trialled protocols and low cost equipment, to encourage their students to ask questions which lead to investigations. Living plant material is robust, widely available, and inexpensive. Plants are full of interesting questions. DNA technology is always in the news but the boundary between fact and fiction is often blurred. Molecular biology at the research level is an expensive enterprise. Genuinely low cost protocols have been developed for extracting DNA from plant material, treating it with restriction endonucleases and visualising the results on minigel systems.