Outreach & Training

Home › Scientific Program › Outreach & Training

Mission

User training is at the core of our facility's mission, and we commit a significant amount of staff effort to training users in the application of standard and advanced macromolecular crystallographic techniques, with a particular focus on challenging time-resolved, Laue crystallography.

Another aspect of our mission is to keep present users, prospective users, and the broader scientific community well informed about capabilities and unique aspects of the facility, core research and development activities, and important scientific findings by our users and staff. To this end, BioCARS staff members actively disseminate our own and collaborative research by publishing in widely read, peer-reviewed journals, by contributing book chapters and review articles, and by participating in national and international scientific conferences.

Teaching material: Time-resolved and Standard Macromolecular Crystallography

Staff Presentations and Publications

BioCARS staff members, together with users, contribute actively to dissemination of important scientific results based on the research conducted at the BioCARS facility. The major forms of dissemination are publications and participation at national and international conferences and workshops.

BioCARS staff publications, 2001-present

BioCARS user and staff publications

Workshops

Most of training and educational activities in BioCARS are informal, daily, one-to-one interactions with our users and collaborators, but we periodically supplement this extensive informal training with more formal, workshop-type training. For example, a workshop we organized in 2006 focused on time-resolved and Laue techniques.

Because a major mission of the BioCARS facility is to develop time-resolved techniques and to train and expand the user community in this area of research, we commit significant time and effort to training new users in all aspects of the time-resolved technique (hardware, software, experimental procedures, data processing and analysis), and to keeping more experienced users up to date on the latest developments.

To support this mission, we organized the Workshop on Time-resolved and Laue X-ray Crystallography, held on May 6-8, 2006, immediately following the APS User Meeting. The goals of the workshop were to present current state-of-the-art capabilities of time-resolved crystallography to the biology and chemistry communities and to stimulate interest in time-resolved phenomena. The workshop brought together an international group of scientists for lectures and offered practical demonstrations of programs for Laue data analysis, the application of singular value decomposition (SVD) to time-resolved data, and hands-on training sessions on data processing. The 70 participants heard a total of 25 presentations (including 7 by international speakers from Europe, Australia, and Japan). The workshop covered a range of topics: an overview of the techniques and their current status, experimental details, computational approaches (including data analysis and software), and applications (including photoreceptors, chemical crystallography, enzymes and large molecules, and spectroscopy). The workshop was judged highly successful and stimulating by all participants.

BioCARS Workshop on Time-resolved and Laue X-ray Crystallography (PDF), May 6-8, 2006, BioCARS/APS, Argonne, IL.

ACA Summer School in Crystallography

The American Crystallographic Association (ACA) Summer School in Crystallography offers another venue for providing training to a broader crystallographic community. The Summer School is conducted at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) under the leadership of Andy Howard, IIT. It provides two weeks of concentrated, lecture-based training, as well as practical, hands-on training on crystallization, data collection at synchrotron facilities such as BioCARS, and use of crystallographic software for data processing and structure solving. We have actively participated in the School for several years, contributing beam time (several days each summer) and staff time, both for hands-on training in standard macromolecular crystallography methods and for lectures on Laue and time-resolved crystallography).

Tours

We give tours of the BioCARS facility frequently and to diverse groups of visitors ranging from members of the general public and high school students to University of Chicago alumni. In 2007, for example, more than 160 visitors toured our facility, most of them students.