Team:Exeter/Notebook/July21
Tuesday, 21 July
Collaboration with Experts/Industry
We had a Zoom call with Professor Steve Simpson, a marine biologist and coral expert who works at our university and has given a TED talk about the impact of climate change on coral reefs. He told us about current reef restoration techniques (microskinning involves breaking up corals and attaching them to large concrete structures to regrow) and the Coral Project run by Dr Jamie Crags in London, that has allowed corals to sexually reproduce in captivity for the first time. He suggested that seeding our printed CaCO3 structure with coral larvae, allowing them to grow in an aquarium and then placing them in the ocean would be more likely to succeed.
We could sell custom-printed CaCO3 structures to aquariums that would encourage coral to regrow more quickly.
Team Collaborations
UCL sent us a presentation with an overview of their project; including the issue they are trying to solve (PET marine pollution and freshwater scarcity), their solution, the design of their Microbial Fuel Cell and the biological processes they are trying to model (e.g. Flux Balance Analysis to determine which PET degradation enzymes they ought to overexpress).