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The beer and biofuels undergraduate research experience began in April,
and this is the first year that we’re running the program
We’re very excited to engage in this because the use of beer in this kind of context generally isn’t that widely used in Australia;
however in places such as Europe, fermentation like this is a common part of the curriculum.
The project’s designed to prepare students for the honours program.
We find that the transition for many students going from a standard undergraduate curriculum,
where there’s a lot of lectures and practical experiences, and then moving into a laboratory where
they have their own research program can be quite steep. By preparing students in this way,
by helping them design their own experiments, and letting them choose what experiments they’ll be performing
it prepares them for not only for honours, but also for a future career in science.
The skills that the students are gaining are very broad, in terms of general handling of microbes and the culturing of saccharomyces,
but they’re also learning how to brew beer, and produce biofuel which there is a very real job market for that.
Beyond that they are performing molecular biology techniques in the fields of biochemistry and genetics,
where they are extracting genomic DNA, and characterising that.
They’re also looking at the products that come from a fermentation, and they’re doing phyotechnique
such as gas chromatography and distillation.
The student responses to the undergraduate research experience have been extremely positive so far,
so much so that we’ve already invested in buying some new expensive equipment to expand the program for next year.
Who knows where it will go from there? Hopefully, someday, we will have our own brewery.