BioCAT held its fifth annual BioSAXS training course from 11/5/19-11/7/19. There were 13 on-site participants, 24 remote participants, and 6 instructors. Day one started off with an excellent overview of the basic physics of SAXS and what kind of information you can obtain from the technique by Dr. Xiaobing Zuo (12ID, APS). This was followed by a talk from Dr. Kushol Gupta (Penn. State) going over the extremely important and sometimes overlooked steps of how to actually plan and perform SAXS experiments. He covered everything from planning what data you want to collect to sample preparation for the experiment, to complementary biophysical techniques for verifying your results. Following that Dr. Srinivas Chakravarthy (BioCAT) gave a short talk about how to get beamtime at BioCAT.
After a short break, Dr. Jesse Hopkins (BioCAT) gave a lecture covering the details on what a scattering profile is and basic SAXS data analysis and validation. Dr. Gupta followed this after lunch with a talk about advanced SAXS data analysis. This series of talks covered everything from getting an Rg to doing SEC-SAXS deconvolution and making envelopes. Dr. Hopkins finished by giving a talk about best practices for publishing SAXS data.
The rest of the afternoon of day 1 was devoted to illustrating advanced topics, to give students and idea of how SAXS can address challenging research questions. Dr. Chakravarthy gave talk discussing time resolved SAXS and how and what you can do with the technique at BioCAT. There was an excellent talk by Dr. Todd Washington (U. Iowa) on his use of all atom brownian dynamics coupled to SAXS data to study flexible systems in solution. The day finished with a talk by Dr. Gupta on atomistic modelign of large assemblies.
Day two started off with a brief introduction to BioXTAS RAW, the data processing software used at the BioCAT beamline (and developed and maintained in-house). Then students spent the rest of the day working through detailed self-guided tutorials that took them from basic SAXS data processing and validation through three dimensional reconstructions. There was a brief interlude where Dr. Tobin Sosnick (U. Chicago) gave a talk on how to use SAXS to study flexible systems, with a particular focus on his study of intrinsically disordered proteins. In the afternoon, students started data collection using the SEC-SAXS instrumentation at the BioCAT beamline.
Day three was focused on data collection at the beamline, with the rest of the students having a chance to run either their own samples or standards that BioCAT scientists had prepared for them. There was also help provided for data analysis of their first SAXS experiments.
