Anoja P. Wickrama Arachchilage and Marawan Ahmed, both PhD students from Swinburne University of Technology, visited the Elettra Sincrotrone in Trieste, Italy in November 2010 to conduct experiments and discuss their work with Italian synchrotron researchers.

The visit was supported by the Australian Synchrotron’s International Synchrotron Access Program, which provides travel funding for Australia based researchers to access overseas synchrotron facilities for experiments that cannot be performed at the Australian Synchrotron.

The aim of the Elettra experiment was to determine the electronic structure of a range of building blocks of antibiotics from bioactive compounds from marine sources, such as phenylethanol and hydroxyphenylethanol, as well as azetidin-2-one, thiazolidine-4-carboxylic acid and thiazolidine-2-carboxylic acid, which are building blocks of antibiotics such as penicillin. The overall aim is to explore the structure-property relationship of bioactive compounds using joint state-of-the-art synchrotron-sourced experimental and theoretical means.

Anoja is a second year PhD candidate and Swinburne Centenary Postgraduate Research Award recipient. She used the Australian Synchrotron in February 2010.

Marawan is a first year PhD candidate and a Swinburne University Postgraduate Research Award recipient. He wrote from Italy: “I am glad because this experience is so good that I have an idea that I may be a Sinchotronist one day”.

Anoja and Marawan are supervised by Professor Feng Wang at Swinburne University and Dr Kevin Prince at the Elettra Sincrotrone.

Thanks to Swinburne University for permission to use material from an article that appeared in the Swinburne Research Bulletin 30 November 2010: 'Rare International Synchrotron experience offered to PhD candidates at Swinburne University'.

A further article about this work appeared in the Swinburne Magazine in July 2011: 'Deconstructing penicillin to save a medical miracle'.