The gap between graduate research and introductory undergraduate teaching laboratories is often wide, but the development of teaching activities rooted within the research environment offers an opportunity for undergraduate students to have first-hand experience with research currently being conducted and for graduate students to develop…

Electrospray ionization-mass spectrometry (ESI-MS) is a powerful technique for the detection, identification, and quantification of organic compounds. As mass spectrometers have become more user-friendly and affordable, many students--often with little experience in mass spectrometry--find themselves needing to incorporate mass spectrometry into…

This adaptable graduate laboratory course on protein purification offers students the opportunity to explore a wide range of techniques while allowing the instructor the freedom to incorporate their own personal research interests. The course design involves two sequential purification schemes performed in a single semester. The first part…

In experimental physics, lab notebooks play an essential role in the research process. For all of the ubiquity of lab notebooks, little formal attention has been paid to addressing what is considered "best practice" for scientific documentation and how researchers come to learn these practices in experimental physics. Using interviews…

The purpose of this experiment is to provide students with the essential skills and knowledge required to perform the extraction, isolation, and structural elucidation of parthenolide from "Tanacetum parthenium" or feverfew. Students are introduced to a background of the traditional medicinal uses of parthenolide, while more modern applications of…

In this article we report on the use of a graduate "Special Topics" course to provide vital research and practical laboratory experience, within the context of developing a chemical process to manufacture biodiesel from algal sources. This course contained several key components that we believe are necessary skills in graduate research: 1) a…

The dissociation constant, K[subscript d], of the binding of riboflavin-binding protein (RP) with neutral red (NR) can be determined by titrating RP to a fixed concentration of NR. Upon adding RP to the NR solution, the maximum absorption peak of NR shifts to 545 nm from 450 nm for the free NR. The change of the absorption can be used to determine…

Quality control (QC) measures are less prevalent in teaching laboratories than commercial settings possibly owing to a lack of commercial incentives or teaching resources. This article focuses on the use of QC assessment in the analytical techniques of high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy (UV-vis) at…