PhD student Daniel Tromans has received the Heatley-Payne Award from the Society of General Microbiology, which has allowed him to travel to the US to carry out a short research visit and present his work at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Microbiology (ASM).

Daniel is a second year Norwich Research Park PhD student based at the School of Chemistry at the University of East Anglia and the John Innes Centre. His studentship is jointly supervised by UEA’s Rebecca Goss, and David Lawson and Mervyn Bibb at JIC.  He is investigating the biosynthesis of pacidamycin, a naturally produced antibiotic made by the soil bacterium Streptomyces.

Daniel visited the lab of Dr. David Newman, Chief of the Natural Products Branch of the National Cancer Institute at Frederick, Maryland, USA.

“I spent two weeks in Dr Newman’s lab, learning about different natural product extraction techniques,” said Daniel. “The group is studying microbe-microbe interactions to try and ‘activate’ cryptic gene clusters in the hope of discovering new natural compounds that have anti-cancer properties.“The research visit and attending the conference have allowed me to develop links with scientists in the States and have hopefully opened the door for me to possibly take a post-doctoral position over there after my PhD studies.”

The Heatley-Payne Award scheme was developed by the SGM and the ASM to strengthen the bonds between the two organisations, which meant that Daniel presented his work at the ASM’s annual meeting in New Orleans.

The Norwich Research Park studentships are funded by the NRP partners (University of East Anglia, John Innes Centre, Institute of Food Research, Genome Analysis Centre, Sainsbury Laboratory and Norfolk and Norwich University Hospitals) to foster collaboration between research labs. The NRP studentships involve at least two NRP partners and are usually multidisciplinary in nature with twelve projects currently in progress.