Achievement

While large universities often boast cutting edge core research facilities, graduate student access can potentially be hindered by department or center affiliation requirements or imposed user fees. To mitigate these barriers, the ICE IGERT program sponsored two new lab modules to provide students with training and access to two core facilities: the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Facility and the Mass Spectrometry (MS) Center. These free modules provided students with hands-on training and encouraged them to explore ways to apply these techniques to their own thesis research. One molecular and cellular biology participant commented, “I have now used mass spec to analyze an organic compound in breast milk and was excited to learn about how to utilize the same principles to study bioconjugates.” A participant from kinesiology incorporated MS techniques to detect subtle changes in proteins, such as phosphorylation, methylation, and truncations, which may occur after cardiac ischemia.