Summary of the 4th Penn State Bioinorganic Workshop – June 2 – 10, 2016
The 4th Penn State Bioinorganic Workshop was held June 2 – 10, 2016 and had a total of 154 participants. Like the 2012 and 2014 workshops, the 2016 workshop featured three parts: (1) presentations given by faculty on their area of expertise, (2) hands-on training in small groups of typically 6 participants and 1-3 teachers in 20 different methods, and (3) presentations by the participants of their research (talks selected from abstracts and poster sessions).
The first part of the workshop included a combination of 90-min introductory lectures aimed at providing the basic features of a given method and 45-min advanced lectures aimed at showcasing the potential of a given method. The slides and recordings of these talks can be accessed below:
- Introduction to coordination chemistry (DeBeer) [slides] [stream]
- Protein electrochemistry (Elliott) [slides] [stream]
- EPR spectroscopy (van der Est) [slides] [stream]
- X-ray spectroscopy (DeBeer) [slides] [stream]
- Isothermal titration calorimetry (Wilcox) [slides] [stream]
- NMR spectroscopy of paramagnetic molecules (Bren) [slides] [stream]
- Mössbauer spectroscopy (Krebs) [slides] [stream]
- Survey of typical EPR spectra (Stoll) [slides] [stream]
- Bioinformatics methods (Babbitt) [slides] [stream]
- Pulse EPR spectroscopy (Stoll) [slides] [stream]
- Continuous-flow resonance Raman spectroscopy (Proshlyakov) [slides] [stream begins minute 51:20]
- Biological electron transfer (Beratan) [slides] [stream]
- Mass spectrometry (Agar) [zipped slides (narrated in shockwave)] [stream from beginning]
- Nuclear resonance vibrational spectroscopy (Lehnert) [slides] [stream begins minute 47:00]
- MCD spectroscopy (Neese) [slides] [stream]
- X-ray crystallography (Einsle) [slides] [stream]
- Transient kinetics (Bollinger) [slides] [stream]
The second part (the center piece of the workshop) provided hands-on training in 20 different methods to small groups (6 or less “students” taught by 1-3 “teachers”). The various experimental topics were offered up to 12 times in 2-h blocks. Regular participants thus had the opportunity to learn up to 12 new methods. The “teachers” included faculty, postdocs, graduate students, undergraduate students, and even a high-school student. The following 20 sections were offered:
- Anaerobic protein purification (Squire Booker, Patrick Corrigan, Jackson Ho, Hayley Knox, Erin McCarthy, and Matt Radle)
- Bioinformatics methods (Patsy Babbitt and Shoshana Brown)
- Cryreduction (Marty Bollinger, Candace Davison, and Jovan Livada)
- DFT calculations with the ORCA software package (Agisilaos Chantzis, Vijay Chilkuri, and Casey Van Stappen)
- Electrochemistry (Pierre Ceccaldi, Sean Elliott, Zhong Fang, Bin Li, and Kim Rizzolo)
- EPR1 – continuous wave EPR (John Golbeck, Mike Gorka, Vasily Kurashov, Alexey Silakov, and Karim Walters)
- EPR2 – pulse EPR (Ellen Hayes and Stefan Stoll)
- EPR3 – transient state EPR (Bryan Ferlez and Art van der Est)
- EPR4 – EPR data analysis (Eckhard Bill, Maria Pandelia, and Alexey Silakov)
- Freeze-Quench method (Marty Bollinger, Susan Butch, Chris Pollock, Erica Schwalm, and Jarett Wilcoxen)
- High-resolution mass spectrometry (Jeff Agar, Tatiana Laremore, and Catie Rawlins)
- Isothermal titration calorimetry (Edward Badding, Michael Cukan, Rachel Johnson, Michael Stevenson, and Dean Wilcox)
- MCD spectroscopy (Andrew Hunt, Nicolai Lehnert, and Matt Wolf)
- Mössbauer spectroscopy (Yisong Guo, Carsten Krebs, and Ryan Martinie)
- NMR of paramagnetic molecules (Kara Bren, Emmanuel Hatzakis, Jesse Kleingardner, Carlos Pacheco, and Frances Pong)
- QQQ mass spectrometry for analysis of small molecules (Matt Bauerle, Anthony Blasczyk, and Nicholas Lanz)
- Resonance Raman spectroscopy (Beth Blaesi, Denis Proshlyakov, Yegor Proshlyakov, and Bo Zhang)
- Stopped-flow absorption spectroscopy (Ellis Beardsley, Marty Bollinger, Rachelle Copeland, Manas Ghosh, Juan Pan, Lauren Rajakovich, and Bennett Streit)
- X-ray crystallography (Amie Boal, Noah Dunham, Oliver Einsle, Ailiena Maggiolo, Andrew Mitchell, and Hannah Rose)
- X-ray spectroscopy (Serena DeBeer, Stefan Hugenbruch, and Julian Rees)
The third part of the workshop featured research presentations by the participants. We had two separate 2-h poster sessions and two half-day sessions featuring a 1-h lecture given by Frank Neese and 12 30-min talks by students and postdocs selected from abstracts.
The 2016 Penn State Bioinorganic Workshop was generously supported by the sponsors listed below. We thank these organizations and companies for their support.
National Science Foundation, Molecular and Cellular Biosciences
Society of Biological Inorganic Chemistry (SBIC)
American Chemical Society – Division of Biological Chemistry