UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Since 2010, the Penn State Eberly College of Science’s Department of Chemistry has hosted the Bioinorganic Workshop for researchers in the bioinorganic chemistry field at Penn State and other universities across the country and around the world to learn from other experts. This year, the workshop welcomed 165 participants and featured eight lectures and 19 different methods of hands-on lab training.
Carsten Krebs, professor of chemistry and of biochemistry and molecular biology, has been a driver since the workshop’s beginnings, along with Marty Bollinger, Mildred Marker Professor of Natural Products Chemistry and professor of chemistry and of biochemistry and molecular biology.
Krebs discussed the workshop, its origins and distinguishing features, and key developments in the field of bioinorganic chemistry.
Q: What is the Bioinorganic Workshop?
Krebs: This workshop is primarily a training opportunity for researchers in the field of bioinorganic chemistry. This field is very diverse and brings together researchers from different areas, and the idea is that they can learn about the different approaches. The more important aspect is that it allows for a great networking opportunity where students, postdocs and faculty members can exchange ideas, get to know each other, and, in the future, become collaborators and forge relationships that are long lasting.
Q: Can you share why and how the workshop was founded?
Krebs: From 1990 to 2000, similar workshops were offered at University of Georgia. In the early 2000s, the entire community felt the impact of no longer having these workshops, and many people discussed restarting them, but no one really took the initiative. Since we have a great infrastructure at Penn State for this type of work, including continuous joint lab space for the entire bioinorganic group — which greatly facilitates interactions between all the members — we started a smaller, two-day workshop in 2010.
That initial workshop was an outreach activity of an award from the U.S. National Science Foundation. Because that workshop was well received, we decided to expand the scope and offer the larger 2012 workshop, which was really successful. Many others joined to enhance the scope of our workshop with additional lectures and instruction, including faculty colleagues Squire Booker and Mike Green, postdocs Alexey Silakov and Amie Boal, from Penn State and Northwestern, respectively — both of whom are now Penn State faculty members — to lecture and teach at our workshop. Since then, the workshops have become a key event for our community, and we offered them regularly until 2018. Now, we are planning to offer the workshop every other year again, with the next one in 2026.
I think the most important aspect of the workshops is that they provide opportunities for networking: students establish collaborations, find their future postdoctoral advisors, etc. Also, former workshop participants who now have faculty positions send their own students. We had 12 students at this workshop who are third-generation participants, because their advisers and their advisers' advisers were all participants.
Q: Why is this workshop special?
Krebs: What makes this workshop special is that ranks are fairly meaningless. We have training opportunities for everyone, and we have faculty teaching and learning. We have students and postdocs teaching, and everyone comes with an open mind to learn more about the area of specialty that someone has to provide. That openness is very characteristic of our field, and that’s what makes this a fun experience.
Q: What makes this workshop unique to Penn State?
Krebs: What makes this workshop unique to Penn State is the fact that we have a good infrastructure for bioinorganic chemistry here. We have a group of multiple faculty members and about 50 to 60 people working in this area, spanning many different areas of expertise and research interests. We host this workshop because we have this unique infrastructure, and we invite many other participants and teachers so that we can all learn from each other. The environment here at Penn State and the layout of our labs are well suited for that.
Q: What is the biggest story that has come out of this area of study at Penn State recently?
Krebs: For me personally, the biggest story that recently came out of our own group is former doctoral student Rachelle Copeland's work on the ethylene-forming enzyme. What I like about that work is that the entire field had no good ideas how this enzyme might work. Rachelle has elucidated how it works in a series of beautiful experiments. It caught us all by surprise. But there are many other intriguing stories from our floor — for example, the work by doctoral student Cody Lloyd, from Squire Booker's group, on the biosynthesis of a lipid, or fat, molecule called GDGT. Cody unraveled the unusual mechanism of the last step of this process, which — like Rachelle’s work — involved completely new and unprecedented chemistry.
Q: What is the next big story you’re looking forward to in this area of study?
Krebs: In general, we are actively looking through the literature to identify unusual chemical reactions and novel reactivity in biological systems and then start to work on the project, with the hope that we can unravel its molecular mechanism.