Amy-Zhou

[Music plays and images of award participants flash by on screen. Text appears: BHP Billiton Science and Engineering Awards 2017]

[Image changes to show Amy Zhou walking through a school]

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Amy Zhou: Hi, my name is Amy Zhou, I’m a Year 12 student at the Queensland Academies Health Science Campus and my project’s title is Self-derived peptides: inhibition of bacterial growth without resistance.

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Ever since I was a child, elementary school teachers they always tell you to wash your hands with antibiotic soap, but as I grew older that’s when I learned about antibiotic resistance and that more and more bacteria were developing resistance to many of the antibiotics we use.

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So that’s why I decided to do this project, because many gram-negative bacteria, such as, E. coli have strains that have become resistant to all of the currently available antibiotics.

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Self-derived peptides are a novel antibiotic that bacteria will not be able to develop resistance to.

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From my research of over 18-days of experimentation, I found that E. coli develops resistance to the standard antibiotic of Enrofloxacin by 256 times, in comparison to the self-derived peptide to which it only developed resistance of two times.

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The biggest challenge I faced was that I’d never been exposed to these techniques and this area of science before. In the beginning my results were very inconsistent and that’s because with bacteria growth it’s very easy to cross contaminate, so I worked for a long time, improving my technique and minimising error as much as I could.

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I actually have a lot of hobbies outside of science. I’m very involved in music; I’ve played piano for 13-years and viola for eight years. Besides music I do like to go on hikes and go on an occasional run and I also am a huge dog lover,

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I have a mini-poodle at home and in my free time I like to spend time with my family and my dog (chuckles).

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The first time I was really intrigued by science was when I saw how when sunlight hits the prism is causes a rainbow, and I remember asking my Dad,

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“Why does that work? – is it magic?” And my Dad always told me that if learned more about science I could unlock that secret and pretty much everything else.

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So since then I’ve always been really, really interested in science, and I really hope to continue with a science career in the future.

[Music plays and text appears: BHP Billiton Science and Engineering Awards 2017]

[Sponsors logos appear on screen]