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You are provided with this team page template with which to start the iGEM season. You may choose to personalize it to fit your team but keep the same "look." Or you may choose to take your team wiki to a different level and design your own wiki. You can find some examples
HERE.
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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.
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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.
|  Your team picture |
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| photo with Sir Alec Jeffreys
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