Research Placement at Azotic - Jessica Buddle

Thanks to DiMeN flexible funding, I was able to do a 3-month placement at Azotic Technologies, Dunnington, York. Azotic technologies is a biotech/agro-tech company, with close links to the universities of York and Durham, which produces Gluconacetobacter diazotrophicus – a bacterium which colonises the plant to fix nitrogen from the air, reducing reliance on fertilisers, and increasing yield.

I was part of the R&D team, which studies G. diazotrophicus to improve product properties. My placement was composed of 2 sides: firstly, I worked as a bioinformatician, filling the gap in the R&D team. I built upon the skills gained during my PhD to perform sequencing analyses, and went beyond my current capabilities, looking at comparative genomics on a multi-strain level. This challenge was incredibly enjoyable, and allowed me to learn about new programs, and build my own analysis pipeline from scratch. I also learnt more about bioinformatic data visualisation, making the data accessible to non-bioinformaticians. I improved my skills both in command line and in R, generating many graphs and diagrams to showcase the data. The second part of my placement involved being in the lab, to phenotypically characterise the strains I had analysed bioinformatically. For the first time in my career as a microbiologist, I worked in a plant lab, looking at interactions between microbe and host. I learnt many new skills here, including designing experiments with plants, growing plants for research, microscopy techniques, and digital PCR. Overall, this placement was very enriching, and allowed me to develop my current skills, as well as gain new skills in my field of interest. 

Completing a placement was very important to me during my PhD, and was one of the huge selling points of DiMeN. Working in industry enabled me to experience this side of research, and understand what a career would be like, if I were to leave academia. Research in an industry setting is undoubtedly very different to the academic research I have done during my PhD, and im very grateful to have had this experience. It has informed my future career aspirations going forward from my PhD, and I am sure the technical and softer skills will both be very useful for my next career steps. Of course, since commercial awareness is one of the top skills employers look for, developing this during my time on placement will also be beneficial to my future.

Overall, I have had a fantastic placement experience, and I am grateful to both Azotic Technologies, and to DiMeN, for allowing this to happen. I encourage anyone on a DiMeN-funded PhD to apply for flexible funding and to do a placement, it is an extremely worthwhile experience.

Type: Research Placement