The adulteration of food products, including honeys and syrups, is of growing concern in global food markets. Detecting adulterated food products can be difficult using traditional analytical methodologies because of complex sample matrices or poor separation of key compounds. NMR is an analytical tool that circumvents some of these issues by…

The Joint Safety Team (JST) was conceived in 2012 by the Departments of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science and Chemistry at the University of Minnesota and the Dow Chemical Company as a model student-led safety organization. The JST initiative was aimed at improving academic safety through four core areas: compliance, awareness, resources,…

The CRISPR/Cas9 system is widely used for editing genes in various organisms and is a very useful tool due to its versatility, simplicity, and efficiency. To teach its principles to post-graduate students we designed a laboratory activity to obtain and analyze PDS3 mutants in "Arabidopsis thaliana" plants consisting of: 1) Design of…

Undergraduate research experience is critical to success in postgraduate research settings. The recent movement away from "cookbook" style laboratories to course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) in undergraduate laboratories has allowed universities to provide inclusive research experience while bypassing the limitations…

With an awareness of the considerable discomfort of graduate students in grasping the crux of key concepts of voltammetry and its variants, I present an inexpensive and user-friendly hands-on setup based on the fabrication of a rotating platinum electrode to facilitate teaching the tenets and applications of hydrodynamic voltammetry (HV). Readily…

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many higher education institutions to offer their courses online, which is quite challenging when implementing laboratory sessions. Here we describe a web-based teaching resource consisting of a metallographic atlas with more than 200 micrographs corresponding to pure metals, binary alloys, steels, cast irons, and…

While lab accidents that involved personal injuries or significant property damage are required to be reported by law, many minor lab incidents or near misses are less frequently reported, especially in an academic research environment. However, public awareness of these stories and incidents create valuable learning opportunities and can prevent…

We have developed a multivariate and multidisciplinary lab experiment on the synthesis of alginate hydrogel beads of various sizes and dye encapsulation for upper-division undergraduate and graduate students. This experiment introduces students to several common concepts in polymer chemistry, materials science, and drug delivery. The experiment…

This report describes the implementation of a laboratory exercise for an advanced biochemistry or enzyme kinetics class at the undergraduate or graduate level, designed to improve understanding of protein conformational changes associated with the binding of a ligand. Students measure the fluorescence changes induced by the conformational…

In order to provide undergraduate students with a full, rich online learning experience we adapted pre-existing online content including graduate courses from Johns Hopkins University Engineering for Professionals (JHU EP) program. These online courses were designed using published methodologies and held to a high level of rigor of a Masters-level…

Fragment-based drug design (FBDD) is a promising methodology to find quality drug leads. It is important in the curriculum of a drug design course due to its impact on drug discovery. However, teaching FBDD and its use by students remain challenging in most cases. A web-based laboratory class to teach FBDD in the form of our copyrighted workshops…

Polymer chemistry is an integral part of art conservation graduate training programs. The list of materials used by artists and artisans and by conservators is vast, with the majority being polymeric in nature. Conservators use an array of polymers as coatings, adhesives, fills, supports, and structures. Aside from the chemistry of these…

A low-cost turbidimeter, colorimeter, and nephelometer (TCN) multipurpose instrument applicable for undergraduate, graduate, and research laboratories is demonstrated within this work. The instrument relies on simple and robust electronics while using a PC sound card as an analog-to-digital converter. The performance of the instrument was…

We demonstrate here a novel laboratory experiment for the synthesis of gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) by using a low energy gold-sputtering method together with a modern, green, and biofriendly deep eutectic solvent (DES). The strategy is straightforward, economical, ecofriendly, rapid, and clean. It yields uniform AuNPs of 5 nm in diameter with high…

The elementary reaction sequence A ? I ? Products is the simplest mechanism for which the steady-state and quasi-equilibrium kinetic approximations can be applied. The exact integrated solutions for this chemical system allow inferring the conditions that must fulfill the rate constants for the different approximations to hold. A graphical…