Team:Leicester

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.

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).

We intend to find and extract the genes involved in the pathway of degrading Expanded Polystyrene (EPS). We can then use this to develop a new pathway involving modifications to existing enzymes able to degrade aromatic and aliphatic hydrocarbons to fit polystyrene and its derivatives into the active sites. The bacteria strain that we insert these new genes into should then be able to degrade polystyrene at a higher rate than natural bacteria.