MEDIC - MicroED Imaging Center - Community Engagement

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Community engagement SUMMARY The primary goals of the community engagement of the proposed MEDIC BTRR are (1) to disseminate and to provide access to MicroED technology, and (2) to facilitate new and exciting research that perhaps is intractable by other methods. This will be mainly accomplished by providing: (1) access to MicroED instrumentation and facilitating interactions with experienced scientists to all who wish to conduct MicroED experiments as part of their own research programs, and (2) outreach to relevant scientific communities in efforts to disseminate recent MicroED advances in a direct and hands-on manner. The Gonen laboratory has worked diligently at community outreach to spread MicroED technology by holding workshops, training new users and collaborated with many groups from research laboratories across the country. To help facilitate continued expansion of MicroED and further collaborations, the MEDIC center will be open to those researchers who have demonstrated a need and desire to conduct MicroED experiments. Collaborators will be able to visit the MicroED imaging center from around the country to engage in MicroED data collection and learn first-hand how to perform the data collection and analysis. We foresee that the greatest collaborator base for MicroED will be within the existing crystallography, cryoEM communities and chemists. Crystallographers have limited experience in the technique, but a wealth of knowledge in crystallization, sample preparation, data collection, analysis using X-ray software while cryoEM, users have access to equipment and cryoEM capabilities for data collection. Chemists and those that are working on drug design and discovery are enthusiastic about MicroED for its potential in facilitating rapid structure determination from femtogram amounts of material that are intractable by other methods. Therefore, we will focus our outreach on these communities through the variety of means described below.