Team:RMIT Australia/Team

Instructors:

• Philip Poronnik
• Leonard Pattenden
• Florencia Camus
• Emily Guo
• Robert Shepherd

Advisors

• Paul Jones
• Damian D'Souza

Undergraduates:

• Symon Smith: Studying biotechnology. Interests outside of science include architecture, music and reading. I hope to one day apply science to the creation of novelty pets, such as tabletop elephants, or glow in the dark cats, while saving the world with synthetic biology.
• Ebony Perkins: Studying biotechnology. Other interests include theatre, travelling and animals.
• Sebastian Ramov: Loves iGEM
• Jeremy Nagels: Loves patent law :-)
• Michelle Chayeb:
• Dannii Kamato:

The Story so far

(19 June 2010):

Jeremy Nagels, a student at Monash university, Ebony and Symon have begun discussing various project ideas. These include:

Oscillators

The use of the Hydrogenase 3 complex to generate Hydrogen within E Coli as a form of biofuel.

The possibility of biological prevention of tooth decay with biobricks.

The application of biobricks to a mixed cell community.

The development of cell free transcription/ translation within a cellular system, for example the phloem of a plant, (although the development of this level of symbiosis may be the stuff of future projects)

The attempt is being made to develop a project that in some ways reflects these interests and possibly taps a common thread underlying them.

  (22th June:)

Work has begun on creating primers to extract the protein we are working on from its wild-type plasmid into a plasmid which conforms to biobrick cloning standards.

(29th June):

The group has undertaken PC2 training in readiness for practical lab work.

(30th June): Work is underway on designing primers to put the protein we are working on into an expression peptide, and the team are upskilling themselves to develop the knowledge required for this process.

Where we're from

Florencia Camus: Chile and Queensland. Len Pattenden: England! and Australia.

Symon: New Zealand and Melbourne. Ebony comes from Geelong. Jeremy from Clayton Monash.