Team:Macquarie Australia/Undergrad Conference

Australasian Conference of Undergraduate Research

ACUR Conference

     To further inform other university students from different areas of study of not only
     synthetic biology but also our project and the methods used in the lab, Kirsten,
     Daniel and Rijata presented at the Australasian Conference of Undergraduate
     Research (ACUR). This was the second time the conference was held and
     attracted a number of undergraduate students from different faculties
     presenting their research they they had performed. It was run over two days,
     the 19th and 20th September at Macquarie University with presentations from 43
     speakers and 19 poster presentations.








Our presentation

At this conference we were allocated 15 min speaking time followed by 5 min
question time. During the presentation we needed to clearly define the concepts
of molecular biology from what is DNA, RNA and proteins to how they all relate
to each other. This was then linked into the process of synthetic biology and
how synthetic biology differs from genetic engineering, a concept we though
a majority of people might have a basic principle of. We then introduced our
project, methodology and results using basic terminology as not overwhelm
non-science audience members. Great interest was shown in our project and were
short-listed for a prize, subsequently we won the Best Presentation in Plant
Science or Molecular Biology.