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When you see how tiny termites can demolish big strong structures, you know there's something in the process that's worth harnessing.

Honours student Ghislaine Small went foraging for termite gold last year. She searched for the bacteria inside termite guts which allow them to break down cellulose - or plant material.

Understanding how bacteria break down cellulose could have a great impact on our ability to produce biofuels, among other uses.

For her project, jointly supervised by Professor Boris Baer and Dr Tamara Hartke (Centre for Integrative Bee Research) and  Associate Professors David Sutton and Christopher Peacock (Microbiology),  Ghislaine collected termites from six colonies across two sites in WA.

By analysing the contents of the termites' guts, she found that the gut communities of two separate termite species were significantly different in the abundance and diversity of the bacterial species present.

"In fact, over half of the gut bacteria from a species found only in WA had never been identified before," Ghislaine said.

Ghislaine presented her findings at the Biomics student poster session late last year, along with Honours and PhD students from all WA universities, where she won second prize in the Genomics section.

She will start a PhD later this year, under Assistant Professor Kate Howell in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Plant Energy Biology.

"I want to look at feeding crop waste to termite colonies to see if their gut population can be optimised to process it," Ghislaine said.

Another Plant Energy Biology student to win an award at the Biomics presentation was undergraduate Sandra Kerbler .

She had picked up one of just 15 Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships available worldwide from the American Society of Plant Biologists . Her work  was so good she found herself competing with PhD students, winning the Proteomics section of Biomics.

Sandra was interested in how plants use phosphate,  which plays a pivotal structural and regulatory role linking photosynthesis, carbon metabolism and energy conservation. Low phosphate availability and/or mobility are common in soil. To overcome this, plants have evolved a variety of responses.

Phosphate fertilisers are both crucial to plant production and declining in availability worldwide.

Sandra used a proteomics approach to investigate whole cell changes in protein abundance and phosphorylation status associated with decreased phosphate supply.

Her results are expected to provide vital insights into the workings of the phosphate-signalling pathway.

She is now studying for her PhD under Winthrop Professor Harvey Millar.