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 roles above were allocated to make the workload lighter, and to give everyone a specific part to play in the team. This way everyone can be working at the same time without clashing for space in the lab.

Our project is about trying to reduce the amount of Expanded PolyStyrene (EPS) waste going into landfill sites by engineering a bacteria to degrade this long lived material. Some bacteria have been found to form biofilms on polystyrene, indicating that it may be being degraded by micro-organisms, 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 intend to isolate the genes involved in the EPS degradation pathway. These can then be used to develop an improved pathway, for example by making modifications to the enzymes that act on polystyrene. One approach is to modify existing enzymes that are able to degrade aromatic and aliphatic hydrocarbons to accommodate polystyrene into their active sites. The bacteria that have these new genes inserted should then be able to degrade polystyrene at a much higher rate than naturally occurring bacteria.

If we can build a bacteria that can degrade the polystyrene it could potentially be applied to landfill sites to degrade the polystyrene in situ, reducing the amount of this long-lasting waste. Alternatively the bacteria could be used as a first step in polystyrene recycling by engineering it to produce chemical intermediates that slot into other synthetic pathways, reclaiming the valuable fossil hydrocarbons the polystyrene was originally made from.