Nutrients & Evolution

Nutrient pollution can often be a hard and costly issue to detect in bodies of water. Even with the right equipment and a lab, samples could take a long time to process. So what is the solution?... Paper! This talk is all about how we created and used paper sensors - along with lots of citizen scientists - to detect different nutrients and where they end up in our environment, as well as some lessons we learned along the way by taking science out of the laboratory.

The Earth’s eco system hinges on the workings of one protein. Rubisco, as it is known, is responsible for 1st step of carbon fixation, the process by which plants extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it to sugars and oxygen. You’d think that such an important protein would have evolved to be super-efficient. But instead its fallen foul of an evolutionary trap resulting in an enzyme, that is quite frankly, rubbish at its job.