Team:Exeter/Diary/wk1

Week T-Minus 2  |  Week T-Minus 1  |  Week 0

18th-22nd June 2012

Project planning began at 9am Monday morning with a huge whiteboard and tonnes of enthusiasm. It's a tall order to try and organise a ten week project between ten students from different backgrounds, but we're working on it!

We all met with Professor Winlove in the giant Physics building to discuss how our Polysaccharide Synthesis could be used in the real world. He gave us lots of food for thought, as well as great views of Exeter.

A few people began developing their coding knowledge and started working on the wiki page. Through reading lots of books and trawling the web for tutorials their knowledge expanded! They also started using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to develop images for the website. It was amazing to see that within a few days so much could visually change for the project.

After meeting with a graphic designer and battling with potential new names and ideas we re-branded our project with the name, e-candi . After showing us several logo concepts we had plenty to consider as we called it a night and went away to design our own. The next day our new name was discussed with the rest of our group and it was agreed that it sounded better than the original "Sweet Shop". In the evening we had a mini presentation, which later turned into a mini competition (showing off our designing abilities), displaying our different logo ideas developed from concepts put forward by our graphic designer Marian. The outright winner by the way was Alex ... sorry Ryan.

Press-relations were considered and an outreach program began with Alex B creating a Polysaccharide based dominoes game which we can use to not only teach school children about our idea but also inspire them to continue studying science! A Café Scientifique session has been organised in September for us to discuss both our project and Synthetic Biology as a whole to a wider audience.

Taking care not to neglect the Biology - Alex B, Freddie, Becca and Mary managed to find a massive list of 120 Glycosyltransferases to add to the database. The design of how the biological system will work was produced. "An Introduction to Systems Biology - Design Principles or Biological Circuits" by Uri Alon was read from cover to cover to help Liam with the modelling processes. The regulatory genetic network plasmid design was created through Tinkercell, with a view to have greater control over enzyme expression.