Tony Trinci
Anthony Peter John Trinci was a British microbiologist, mycologist and botanist who was a leading expert on filamentous fungi. He served as a Professor, Dean and Pro-vice-chancellor at the University of Manchester.
Early life and education
Trinci's parents, both born in Italy, had a troubled marriage and separated before his birth in Swindon. His father, a builder, lived in Italy, and Trinci did not meet his father until he was 11 years old. Trinci grew up in Barking, London. During World War II, a V-1 flying bomb passed through his bedroom, brought down the ceiling, but failed to explode until it landed about 100 yards down the road and killed several people.Educated at St Bonaventure's Catholic School, Trinci studied Botany at Durham University in 1959. He was a member of St Cuthbert's Society, Durham. He stayed on to complete a Master of Science degree, where his research focus was fungal physiology.
Trinci served as a secondary school science teacher in Rayleigh, Essex before returning to Durham for PhD research supervised by Geoffrey Howard Banbury and completed in 1965 on the physiology and tropisms of tall conidiophores of the fungus Aspergillus giganteus.
Career and research
In 1964 Trinci was appointed a lecturer in the microbiology department of Queen Elizabeth College. At QEC he did research on fungal growth kinetics and physiology. He developed new methods involving time-lapse photography that enabled "direct observation of colony growth and organisation of the mycelium by hyphal tip growth and branch initiation".He moved from QEC in 1981 after being appointed as chair of cryptogamic botany at the University of Manchester. There he contributed to the development of the first integrated school of Biological sciences. This innovation was subsequently adopted in most of the UK's universities. At the University of Manchester he became a dean and then pro-vice-chancellor.
Trinci's knowledge of mycology was applied to commercial applications of filamentous fungi. He made substantial contributions to the development of Quorn and to Dupont's addition of fungal enzymes to commercial animal feed. His work with DuPont was the outcome of a decades-long collaboration with Michael K. Theodorou, a rumen microbiologist. Their collaboration elucidated the life cycles of anaerobic fungi in the gastrointestinal tracts of large, mammalian herbivores. A phytase enzyme, isolated from Penicillium species, is useful in releasing phosphate in animal feeds.
Trinci served as president of the British Mycological Society for the academic year 1991–1992 and was elected the president of the Microbiology Society in 1994. He was awarded the Marjory Stephenson Prize in 1994. He served an editor of the Journal of General Microbiology from 1990 to 1994, after which the journal was renamed Microbiology.
Trinci supported David Denning's creation of the University of Manchester's Manchester Fungal Infections Group, an international centre for fungal infection biology. Trinci served as a trustee of the Fungal Infection Institute from September 2006 to January 2011.
His former PhD students include Keith Gull who worked on the antifungal agent Griseofulvin.
Selected publications
Trinci's publications include:- Griseofulvin inhibits Fungal Mitosis
- Anaerobic fungi in the digestive tract of mammalian herbivores and their potential for exploitation
Personal life