Team:Leicester

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Revision as of 08:51, 13 July 2012

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The team consists of a computer scientist, 2 organic chemists, 3 genetecists, and 3 biochemists. The whole team has been insured by the genetics department to work in the lab so all of us can contribute to the actual experiments.

Chris Morton - Team Leader
Anthony Cox - Vice Team Leader
Philip Higgs - Treasurer
Luke Thompson - Lab Leader
Nathan Hanna - Webmaster
Will Harrison - Chief Fundraiser
Emily Halsey - Bioinformatician
Reema Naran - Organic Chemist
Mohammed Idres - Organic Chemist

The jobs were allocated to make the workload lighter, and so everyone has a specific part to play in team, and so everyone can be working at the same time without clashing for work or space in the lab.

Our project is about trying to reduce the waste going into landfill sites by engineering a bacteria to degrade polystyrene. Some bacteria have been found to form biofilms on polystyrene, indicating that polystyrene may be being degraded, albeit at a very slow rate. We have several different parts to our project, including a citizen science experiment (CSE).

Over the summer the team intends to find and extract the genes involved in the pathway of degrading Expanded Polystyrene (EPS). This can then be used to develop an improved pathway, involving modifications to the enzymes that act on polystyrene, and the existing enzymes able to degrade aromatic and aliphatic hydrocarbons to fit polystyrene and its derivatives into the active sites. The bacteria strain that has these new genes inserted should then be able to degrade polystyrene at a higher rate than natural bacteria.

This new strain that can degrade the polystyrene could then be applied to landfill sites to degrade the polystyrene reducing the amount of long-lasting waste and saving the ground from long-term pollution, as well as being used by companies to stop polystyrene from being put into landfill sites in the future.

From left to right: Nathan Hanna,

photo with Sir Alec Jeffreys

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 This new strain that can degrade the polystyrene could then be applied to landfill sites to degrade the polystyrene reducing the amount of long-lasting waste and saving the ground from long-term pollution, as well as being used by companies to stop polystyrene from being put into landfill sites in the future.
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