Volume 3, Issue 4

The PARC Periodical

Inside this issue:

PARC Completes Mid-Cycle Re-

view in Baltimore (Continued)

2

Welcome Dr. Gregory Scholes

2

Graduate Stu-dent/Postdoc

Seminar Event March 28

2

Education and Outreach Corner

3

Meet postdoctoral

associate Matthew Cuneo

4

Events and Reminders

5

PARC Completes Mid-Cycle Review in Baltimore

Spring Seminar Series Kicks Off on April 3!

PARC’s Spring Seminar Se-ries was originally scheduled to begin on March 20. Unfor-tunately, due to illness, Mau-reen McCann’s talk had to be cancelled. PARC is pleased to have a remaining full seminar line-up:

April 3, 2012 :: Mike Wasielewski EFRC Director, Argonne-Northwestern Solar Energy Research (ANSER) Center.

April 10, 2012 :: Greg Scholes University of Toronto

May 1, 2012 :: Jennifer Ogilvie University of Michigan

May 8, 2012 :: Sergei Savikhin Purdue University

All seminars will be held from 11:00 a.m. — 12:00 p.m. central time at Washington University in Brauer Hall Room 12, and live streamed on Adobe Connect at http://wustl.adobeconnect.com/parc. Recordings of the seminars will also be avail-able afterwards on the PARC NING network and web site. Please mark your calendars and plan to attend!

Eighteen members of PARC traveled to Baltimore, Mary-land March 5—6, 2012 for a scientific review by the U.S. Department of Energy. The mid-term review, in the third year of the five-year award period, is meant to provide a critical assessment of an individual Energy Fron-tier Research Center’s (EFRC) strategic vision, sci-entific plans and progress, and technical accomplish-ments. The review also re-quired a report, submitted eight weeks prior to the all-day, in-person assessment. PARC began its review high-lighting leadership and re-search by several principal investigators (PIs): • 2012 Scientific Overview

& Management by Direc-tor Bob Blankenship and

Associate Director and Theme 3 Leader Dewey Holten

• Natural Antennas: Struc-ture and Efficiency by Theme 1 Leader Himadri Pakrasi

• Native and Synthetic Chromophores for Bio-hybrid and Bioinspired Antennas by PI Jon Lindsey.

• Biohybrid Antenna Com-plexes by Associate Di-rector and Theme 3 Leader Dewey Holten

• Bioinspired Maquette Antennas by PI Les Dut-ton.

• Nanopatterning and Mi-croscopy of Antenna Complexes by Theme 2 Leader Neil Hunter

After the morning presenta-tions, an hour-long poster session was held. Postdoc-toral associates, students

and staff presented the fol-lowing: 1. Light-Harvesting Pig-

ment Distribution in Liv-ing Photosynthetic Or-ganisms Determined by Hyperspectral Confocal Fluorescence Micros-copy, Aaron Collins (Timlin lab)

2. Light Harvesting in Cyanobacteria, Michelle Liberton (Pakrasi lab)

3. Synthetic Chlorophyll Proteins for Artificial Photosynthesis, Olga Mass (Lindsey lab)

4. Self-assembly of Chlo-rins in aerosol droplets for synthesizing biomi-metic antennas, Vivek Shah (Biswas lab)

5. Improving Photosyn-thetic Efficiency: In-volvement of LHCII and Pigments, Sangeeta

(Continued on page 2)

March 2012

PARC Page 2

PARC Completes Mid-Cycle Review in Baltimore (Continued)

Negi (Sayre lab) 6. Biohybrid Antenna Complexes for

Enhanced Light-Harvesting, Joey Springer (Holten lab)

7. PARC: Harvesting Solar Energy for the Future, Operations & Grants Manager Natalie Goodwin-Frank

8. Investing in the Future: Enriching Energy Education and Outreach at the PARC, Education & Outreach Coordinator Rachel Ruggirello

After lunch the presentations continued with work highlighted by PARC staff, PIs, postdoctoral associates and stu-dents: • Education and Outreach by Educa-

tion & Outreach Coordinator, Ra-chel Ruggirello

• Simulations of Antenna Structure and Function by PI Cynthia Lo

• Neutron Crystallography and Small Angle Scattering of Antenna Com-plexes by PI Volker Urban

• Ultrafast Laser Facility by Re-search Scientist Darek Niedz-wiedzki

• Mass Spectrometry Facility by Staff Scientist Hao Zhang

• Synthetic Chlorosomal-Type An-tenna by graduate students Olga Mass (Lindsey lab), Joey Springer (Holten lab), and Vivek Shah (Biswas lab)

• Investigating the Impact of An-tenna Size by postdoc Sangeeta Negi (Sayre lab)

• Organization of the Photosynthetic Apparatus in Cyanobacteria by postdoc Michelle Liberton (Pakrasi lab)

• Large-Scale Reorganization of Thylakoid Pigments in Synecho-cystis 6803 phycobilisome mutants by postdoc Aaron Collins (Timlin

lab)

The review concluded with small group discussions along with the various re-view teams. Reviewers consisted of DOE staff and an external panel of scientific experts. The external expert panelists and DOE staff will provide comments along with a review analysis and recommenda-tions to PARC leadership in the com-ing months. In an email to all eighteen review par-ticipants, PARC Director Bob Blankenship thanked everyone for a job well done and expressed his grati-tude for the hard work in preparing, organizing, and presenting the mate-rial.

(Continued from page 1)

Welcome Dr. Gregory Scholes to the PARC Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC)

Please join PARC in formally welcom-ing Dr. Greg Scholes, the D.J. LeRoy Distinguished Professor of Chemistry from the University of Toronto, as the newest member of the PARC Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC). Greg confirmed his membership on February 8, 2012. PARC also looks forward to Greg’s talk as part of the PARC Seminar Series on April 10.

Other members of the SAC include: • Chair, Thomas Moore, Arizona

State University • Elizabeth Gantt, University of

Maryland • Kenneth Sauer, University of Cali-

fornia, Berkeley • Marion Thurnauer, Emerita, Ar-

gonne National Laboratory

On behalf of PARC, thank you to all of the members for continuing to serve on the SAC.

Graduate Student/Postdoc Seminar Event March 28 — by Aaron Collins, Postdoctoral Associate, Timlin group

If you missed PARC’s inaugural gradu-ate student and post-doc seminar held on Adobe Connect, don’t FRET (resonance energy transfer pun in-tended), we are having another. Please join us on Wednesday, March 28 at 11 am (Central Time, US). We are pleased to have three excellent presentations of which two will give insight into PARC’s mass spectrometry and ultrafast laser facilities. The goal of these sessions is to in-crease the level of communication and discussion of PARC graduate

students and post-docs, and perhaps strike up collaborations. If you are new to PARC or interested in learning about what some of the other PARC groups are doing, this is a great oppor-tunity to do so. The Adobe Connect interface will allow for dynamic interac-tions so you are encouraged to have a microphone and we ask that you use headphones to minimize feedback or alternatively headsets seem to suffice.

This distribution list is likely not com-plete so please forward...to other graduate students and post-docs that might have been omitted. Sign on 15 minutes early if you are new to Abode Connect and we will get you setup. We will have three, 10-15 minute pres-entations each followed by discussion from all participants;

(Continued on page 3)

Right: Gregory Scholes

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

http://wustl.adobeconnect.com/students/

11:00 am – 12:00 pm (central time, US)

Review posters are available for

viewing on the PARC Ning network.

Page 3 Volume 3, Issue 4

Education and Outreach Corner by Rachel Ruggirello, Education and Outreach

Mini-Grant Project Update. We are currently coordinating a cam-pus visit for 10 high school stu-dents. During their visit, students will have the opportunity to visit the research laboratory of Profes-sor Yan Mei Wang, a PARC re-search affiliate in the Department of Physics and the Division of Bi-ology and Biomedical Sciences at Washington University. Dr. Wang’s research focuses on bio-logical mechanisms at the mo-lecular level using single molecule fluorescence imaging techniques (http://wang.physics.wustl.edu/). During the visit students will have the opportunity to create images of single molecules and store them on a jump drive that they will be able to take back to the class-room with them. Students will also tour Washington University’s cam-

pus and have lunch with under-graduate and graduate students. Dr. Wang’s project is funded through a PARC Education & Out-reach mini-grant.

Conference Presentation & Publication. This month, PARC’s work is being disseminated at the annual conference of the National Science Teachers Association in Indianapolis. The presentations will focus on the hot topics work-shops and the calendar project at Maplewood Richmond Heights. In addition, an article highlighting a laboratory experience designed for the hot topics workshop is in press in the Journal of Biochemis-try and Molecular Biology Educa-tion. The article will be published in the July/August issue.

New Video. During PARC’s An-nual Review with the Department of Energy, we highlighted the ways in which PARC is enriching education and outreach around renewable energy. View the video that we put together that high-lights our site visits through the Events and Topics in Bioenergy series, work with the Science Olympiad program at KIPP: In-spire Academy and the hot topics workshops: http://www.youtube.com/user/parcwustl

Are you interested in PARC outreach ideas for your institution? Contact Rachel Ruggirello (ruggirello@wustl.edu).

Below: Photos from previous PARC laboratory visits.

Gregory Orf – Blankenship Labora-tory, Washington University "Connecting the Chlorosome to the FMO Protein: Reconstituting a Functional CsmA-FMO Complex" Dr. Dariusz Niedzwiedzki – PARC Ultrafast Laser Facility, Washington

University “Ultrafast Laser Facility” Dr. Hao Zhang – PARC , PARC Mass Spectrometer Facility, Wash-ington University “Native MS studies of Protein Com-plexes”

This seminar is FREE and open to all graduate students and post-docs. Please join us for the discussion.

(Continued from page 2)

This month’s featured PARC re-searcher is Matt Cuneo, a post-doctoral associate at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Matt recently completed a visit to PARC Director Bob Blankenship’s lab at Washington University as part of the PARC Scientific Exchange Program. Please tell us a little about your-self. I am a structural biologist who has specialized in both solution and crystallographic analysis of mac-romolecules. I am interested in understanding how we can trans-late molecular-level details, ob-tained through structural biology, into an understanding of macro-scopic events. In much of this work, arguably one of the most important atoms in biology, the protons, are typically not observ-able. However, using neutrons in structural biology allows one to readily visualize protons. I re-cently joined ORNL because of the state of the art neutron facili-ties there allow direct visualization of these important molecular level details.

Please tell us about your recent PARC Scientific Exchange Pro-gram experience.

The Blankenship lab has worked with photosynthetic machinery for many years and they have signifi-cant expertise in purifying the vari-ous components from whole cells. This type of protein purification can be very specific to the organ-ism, or protein that one is working with, and often-times requires methodology that is non-standard. For structural analysis of these proteins, we require large amounts of very pure protein. To help push these efforts along, we were interested in learning the purification process of a photosyn-thetic antenna protein so that we could translate some of the Blankenship knowledge into our own laboratory at ORNL. During my stay in the Blankenship lab Greg Orf and I went through the whole protein purification process, from growing the cells to the final highly purified protein. The real test of this scientific exchange will occur shortly when we purify the first batch of protein at ORNL.

Please tell us about some of the projects you are working on as part of your PARC effort. My role in the PARC project is to determine the neutron crystallo-graphic structure of photosynthetic antennal proteins, such as the FMO proteins from C. tepidum or P. aestuarii. We are interested in understanding the hydrogen bond-ing networks of the pigments in these proteins. These hydrogen bonding interactions and the local electrostatic environments are very important in fine-tuning and control of their site energies. Neu-tron experiments allow direct visu-alization of the hydrogens and should therefore allow a new level of detail to this energy transduc-tion process that has only previ-ously been inferred.

Meet Matthew Cuneo, Postdoctoral Associate, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Page 4 PARC

“My role in the PARC project is to determine the

neutron crystallographic

structure of photosynthetic

antennal proteins…”

Above: Matt Cuneo at work.

One Brookings Drive Campus Box 1138 St. Louis, Missouri 63130

Phone: (314)935-4499 Fax: (314)935-4925 Email: parc-efrc@wustl.edu

• PI Meeting, MARCH 27, 2012

• Seminar Series featuring Mike Wasielewski, APRIL 3, 2012

• Seminar Series featuring Greg Scholes, APRIL 10, 2012

• Subawardee Annual Reports due to PARC, APRIL 30, 2012

• Seminar Series featuring Jennifer Ogilvie, MAY 1, 2012

• Annual Report due to DOE, MAY 7, 2012

• Seminar Series featuring Sergei Savikhin, MAY 8, 2012

• PI Meeting, MAY 22, 2012

• Scientific Exchange Program applications due, JULY 1, 2012

• All Hands Meeting, JULY 18 — 19, 2012

• Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC) Meet-ing, JULY 20, 2012

• PI Meeting, SEPTEMBER 25, 2012

PHOTOSYNTHETIC ANTENNA RESEARCH

CENTER

Important Reminders:

PARC Page 5

http://parc.wustl.edu

• Please remember to acknowledge PARC in all relevant publications, using the following citation: This work was supported as part of the Photosynthetic Antenna Research Center (PARC), an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences under Award Number DE-SC 0001035.

• Please e-mail (parc-efrc@wustl.edu) the complete citations of PARC publications. This is

important for DOE reporting and the maintenance of the information on our public website. • When reporting to the DOE, we would like to present a list of all PARC collaborations, formal

and informal. Please report any face-to-face meetings and their duration with other PARC PIs, postdoctoral fellows, or graduate students (parc-efrc@wustl.edu).

• Please e-mail Erin Plut with details on any PARC-related outreach activities (including talks/

lectures). It is very important that we report all outreach activities in our reports to the DOE. • We are happy to advertise PARC job openings on our website. Please contact

parc-efrc@wustl.edu if you have a position to post. • Please inform us of any changes in laboratory personnel working on PARC projects so that

we may keep our contact information up to date.

Events and Announcements:

DO YOU HAVE SOMETHING YOU WOULD LIKE TO

SHARE?

Newsletter contributions can be

submitted to parc-

efrc@wustl.edu.

Newsletter Editors: Natalie Goodwin-Frank

and Erin Plut PARC is supported by the US Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences as part of an Energy Frontier Research Center.