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Sunday, 29 November -0001

BioXFEL Administration and the Education and Diversity Committee are continuously refining our education program, diversity integration efforts, collaborative interactions and community outreach. As the Center implements new programs, each program is subjected to iterative rounds of refinement that are designed to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the program. As a result of these efforts, the new UPR Graduate Student Internship program has been enhanced within the last year.

This year, 4 UPR graduate students joined BioXFEL for 4 months. They were able to bring their thesis projects and utilize BioXFEL resources (See The above section on UPR Graduate Internships for more details). This experience was very effective and helped each Graduate intern immensely. However, it was not very efficient. BioXFEL was only able to interact with a small number of interns at a time and the program was rather costly (stipends to cover travel and housing and research materials costs). The internship was a great learning experience for BioXFEL administration as well. The Center gained a lot of insight into the needs and difficulties of the UPR Graduate Students. One commonality of all interns was the disadvantage placed on them by an academic setting that did not directly support their research endeavors on an educational level. That is, each student is a member of the Chemistry Department, takes primarily Chemistry classes, but work on thesis projects based on Biochemistry. As a result, none 

of the interns had a formal educational training in protein science and relied on knowledge passed down from mentors within the laboratory. The Center discovered that many of the protein handling techniques being propagated within the labs were inappropriate, unfounded or in poor practice. BioXFEL, in conjunction with UPR faculty, will instruct a full day workshop that includes lectures, live examples of materials and techniques (as appropriate), published handouts of the presentation and examples of common, standard protocols. The outline for the workshop topics are included below.

BioXFEL has collaborated with the UPR Chemistry departments Graduate Student Association to promote the event and provide food for the Workshop. This interaction has proven to be very effective and should become standard practice for future events and at other institutions.

Activity Name	BioXFEL Protein Production and Purification Workshop at UPR
Led By	William Bauer (HWI), Belinda Pastrana (UPR), Jose Olmos (Rice), Bradley Miller (UB), Domingo Meza (ASU)
Intended Audience	Undergraduate and graduate students of UPR Mayaguez
Number of Attendees	50 Graduate and Undergraduate UPR Mayaguez students

BioXFEL Protein Production and Purification Workshop Course Syllabus

1)     Brief overview of the workshop, materials and objectives (15 minutes)

a)     Outline of topics, speakers and techniques

2)     Introduction to protein biochemistry (90 minutes)

a)     Basic protein characteristics

i)      Protein biogenesis: transcription and translation

ii)     Basic amino acids

b)     Introduction to protein structure

i)      Primary, secondary, tertiary structure

ii)     Common folds and types of interactions

iii)   Importance of protein structure/ function relationship

3)     Introduction to common cloning techniques (90 minutes)

a)     Basic concepts of recombinant protein production

i)      Plasmid architecture

(1)   Regulatory elements (promoters, enhancers, inhibitors), antibiotic selection, RBS

(2)   Codons – start and stop, codon bias and optimization

(3)   Common protein fusion tags and protease restriction sites

b)     Cloning Technique 1 – Restriction enzyme cloning

i)      Basic concept of cloning

(1)   Main objective

(2)   Choosing a target protein construct

ii)     Primer Design and target amplification

iii)   Restriction digest and ligation

iv)    Transformation and colony selection

c)     Alternative cloning methods

i)      Overview of alternative methods

(1)   LIC, Gateway cloning, topoisomerase cloning, Gibson Assembly

(2)   Advantages and disadvantages of various techniques

4)     Introduction to recombinant protein expression (90 minutes)

a)     Choosing an expression system

Results of the BioXFEL Protein Production and Purification Workshop at UPR, Mayaguez Campus

1. Through our collaboration with the UPR Chemistry Departments Graduate Student Association, we had 50 students (undergraduate and graduate) attend the workshop. BioXFEL will increase the effectiveness of their training efforts at UPR.
2. Knowledge gained and effectiveness of the workshop will be assessed by a post-activity survey. Upon completion of the workshop and survey, students will be presented with a certificate of completion to validate their participation in the workshop.
3. Propagation of knowledge through the UPR laboratories will be assessed when new interns (undergraduate and graduate) fill future positions at BioXFEL. 

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