Team:Exeter/Diary/wk2

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25th-29th June 2012

A meeting kicked off the week to find out where everyone's at within the project and to set targets for the week ahead. This helped us all to focus on the tasks in hand and to coordinate what individuals are doing.

The colossal list of 120 Glycosyltransferases has been narrowed to only 20 which can make viable pathways.

The Polysaccharides database plan began with a diagram of how the system works. It's a small step, but it had to be done. Liam, Alice and Andy discussed many different methods for implementing the database using programs from Microsoft Access to SQLite and Python. Liam started going through Python tutorials and managed to create a calculator in a couple of hours - pretty cool.

Novel uses for the Polysaccharides were considered:

• Cotton is made from Polysaccharides but is currently produced in very damaging ways.

• Cotton farming accounts for 8-10% of the worlds pesticide use and in developing countries this is up to 50%. The World Health Organisation (WHO) says that there are several million cases of pesticide poisoning each year related to cotton causing between 20,000 and 40,000 deaths.
• To obtain about 1 kg of cotton lint, which is about enough for a pair of jeans, 8500 litres of water is required. This is equivalent to 40 baths worth of water just for one pair of Levis.
• Due to irrigation of cotton the Aral Sea has decreased in size by 85% over the last 40 years leading to the destruction of ecosystems and biodiversity and the extinction of at least 24 native fish species. Due to cotton cultivation habitats are being destroyed all over the world. On top of all this the cotton industry is guilty of terrible working conditions. The India Committee of the Netherlands reported that nearly 450,000 children between 6 and 14 were employed in cotton fields in India during 2003-04.

• Grow your own bridge - Hydrophobic domains repel the presence of water spontaneously creating a bridge over water. Hopefully I won't be the first person to walk across it!

• Warm Wetsuit - incorporate Xylomannan (found in Alaskan Beetles) can be incorporated into wetsuit design to allow the user to resist below freezing temperatures.

• Pressure Equaliser - using Hyaluronan to repel the pressure to allow divers to survive deeper depths.

After many tireless nights, the wiki became live at 2am on Thursday from Ryan's house! A very exciting day!

Tom, Alice, Andy and Ryan met with Ed Creed, a marketing executive from the University to help us advertise the project, as well as iGEM. We're looking forward to having many more hits on the wiki and hopefully we’ll get some press releases created next week.