Current projects
If you are interested in doing an undergraduate research project (SCIE3500), honours or PhD project please get in touch with me. The following gives an idea of undergraduate research projects available at the moment:
a) Macromolecular therapeutics by high throughput synthesis:
Since its discovery in the late 1990s, the TRAIL protein (tumour necrosis factor related apoptosis inducing ligand; also known as Apo2L), has been widely pursued as a highly selective and potent chemotherapeutic across a wide variety of cancers. Yet, despite a massive research investment from both academia and industry, all variants of the TRAIL protein have failed to show efficacy in the clinic to date due to the protein’s poor stability and bioavailability. We are using a high throughput polymerisation method established in our lab to make synthetic mimics of TRAIL that can replicate it’s biological activity but which have vastly improved pharmacokinetics (circulation times of up to 50 h).[1-2] The project involves a mixture of synthetic organic chemistry, polymer chemistry, and in-vitro cell assays.
b) Protecting the nitrogenase enzyme to make a nitrogen battery (with CSIRO Canberra). We are interested in using a natural enzyme called nitrogenase for the electrochemical conversion nitrogen to ammonia, for energy storage applications. Nitrogenase is extremely efficient at driving this reaction, but its use is hampered by its sensitive to oxygen. This project will focus on developing methods to stabilise the enzyme by co-encapsulating it in a polymersome with another enzyme called glucose oxidase, which is able to consume oxygen. This should stabilise nitrogenase, and enable it to be used in regular oxygenated solutions. The project forms part of a larger project with CSIRO Canberra. Our collaborators have developed excellent and robust techniques for preparing and isolating the enzyme from bacterial cultures, and will supply the enzyme for our work.
c) Depolymerisation of plastic waste using polymer-coated enzymes (with Prof Erica Wanless & Prof Dominik Konkowlewicz). This project aims to design polymer coatings for enzymes that will enable them to be embedded into polyethylene, and later activated to in a compost heap to decompose the plastic to small molecules. Enzymes are normally very difficult to disperse in polyethylene, but we have recently developed a range of chemistries to prepare polyacrylate-polyethylene block copolymers that should enable this. By using high throughput polymer synthesis and screening techniques that we have already developed, this project will design polyacrylates that encapsulate plastic eating enzymes and embed them into the bulk material in such a way that they can be activated to depolymerise the material on demand.
