Tracy Palmer The 45th Lorne Conference on Protein Structure and Function 2020

Tracy Palmer

Tracy Palmer was born and raised in Sheffield, UK. Throughout her career she has had a major interest in the processes by which bacteria secrete proteins into their environment. Her first degree was in Biochemistry at the University of Birmingham, and her PhD, also from Birmingham, was in bioenergetics under the supervision of Baz Jackson. She started her independent research career at the John Innes Centre with a Royal Society University Research Fellowship, and shortly afterwards she published a series of papers describing the newly discovered bacterial Tat protein secretion system. Tracy has worked on the Tat system for over 20 years, publishing more than 80 papers on this topic. More recently she initiated work on a second type of protein transporter– the Type VII secretion system (T7SS) in the human pathogen Staphylococcus aureus. Her group have demonstrated for the first time that the T7SS is involved in interbacterial competition by showing that the S. aureus T7SS secretes a large nuclease toxin, which inhibits the growth of closely related S. aureus strains. Tracy is currently Professor of Microbiology at Newcastle University, moving there in 2018 from her previous post at the University of Dundee. Tracy has received numerous awards throughout her career. In 2002 she jointly received the Microbiology Society Fleming Prize with her longstanding collaborator Ben Berks for their description of the bacterial Tat pathway. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2009, a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology in 2015 and a Member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation in 2017 and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2018. Palmer's main research interest is in the processes by which bacteria secrete proteins into their environment. She was one of the co-discoverers of the bacterial Tat protein secretion system. The Tat system is highly unusual because it transports folded proteins of variable sizes across biological membranes while at the same time maintaining the impermeability of the membrane to ions. Palmer has initiated work on a second type of protein transporter– the Type VII secretion system (T7SS) in the human pathogen Staphylococcus aureus. Her group have demonstrated for the first time that the T7SS is involved in interbacterial competition by showing that the S. aureus T7SS secretes a large nuclease toxin, which inhibits the growth of closely related S. aureus strains.