This special collection on New Ways to Teach Structural Science to the Next Generation continues the tradition of publishing the proceedings of the Transactions Symposium of the American Crystallographic Association (ACA), in an open access issue of Structural Dynamics. Herein, we present proceedings from the 5–6 August 2020 Transactions Symposium organized for the 70th Annual Meeting of the ACA, which was held virtually for the first time during the COVID-19 pandemic. Structural Science: New Ways to Teach the Next Generation was envisioned well before the pandemic by the ACA Council in order to bring increased attention to the need for crystallographic and structural science education and skill building for students and early career scientists. The timing could not have been better; with so many working remotely, there has been an increased need for thinking about teaching structural science inside and outside the classroom.
Joseph Ferrara (Ferrara et al., 2021) shares his experiences of greatly expanding his audience during Teaching a Large Scale Crystallography School with Zoom Webinar. Both editions of the course, typically held in-person over the summer, had over 1100 students registered. Due to the course delivery, students from all over the world with a variety of abilities, backgrounds, and challenges were able to participate. The practical applications based course covered topics from crystallization to reporting and cif checking, in addition to data collection, processing, and structure solution. The course used freely available software and issued certificates of attendance to those who participated and certificates of achievement to those who passed a final examination. The success of this course was attributed to a dedicated team of facilitators who collectively spent over 550 hours preparing for course delivery and associated aspects.
Highlighting the power of the visual, David S. Goodsell (Goodsell et al., 2021) has for more than 20 years delighted audiences with his Molecule of the Month column hosted by the RCSB PDB. Focusing on macromolecules from Actin to Zika, and on topics of current relevance such as the opioid epidemic and COVID-19, Dr. Goodsell has used his distinctive style to tell an interesting story rather than bulleted facts. This approach is very popular; his readers from around the world accessed Molecule of the Month content nearly a million times in 2019. The contribution described his approach to molecular storytelling, which he connects to the nature guides that he was inspired by in his youth. His formula for storytelling is to provide context and show process while reducing jargon. With this approach, Goodsell aims to generate excitement for learning and discovery while bringing the structures of macromolecules of importance to everyday life into focus.
A contribution from William Bauer describes An X-ray Free Electron Laser (XFEL) Science Education Model Designed for Large Centers and its Application To Individual Laboratories (Bauer and Woodruff, 2021). Dr. Bauer begins by noting how important a diverse range of disciplines is in the XFEL field, and that attention to interdisciplinarity and collaboration are crucial to training the next generation of practitioners. In addition to scientific contributions, the BioXFEL Science and Technology Center provides customized educational programming for scientists, students, and the general public. The work outlines the goal of providing appropriate programming at all education levels to create a progression of learning and training with attention to inclusive mentorship, and the authors note the long-term benefits of making crystallographic education accessible and available to future generations. The Center has been particularly successful in providing summer internships, cross-training scholarships, and customized scientific workshops hosted at BioXFEL partner facilities.
Cora Lind-Kovacs cites the problem of the decline in formal crystallography teaching during the age of modern instrumentation and computing, which contributes to errors in data processing and interpretation. Her contribution discusses strategies for attracting newcomers to crystallography; in her words, inviting “newcomers to a successful life in reciprocal space” (Lind, 2021). Dr. Lind-Kovacs gave an overview of their in-house small molecule, macromolecular, and powder crystallography courses, included examples of hands-on projects, and ended by offering that practitioners should be willing to make themselves available in their communities for informal crystallography teaching.
The course X-ray Lite: A 1-Credit Pass/Fail Crystallography Course is designed to target students who will need crystallographic analyses conducted in the course of their research but who rely on the x-ray facility to conduct the analyses. In describing this experience, Dr. Carla Slebodnick argues that without some exposure to the theory and practical methodology of crystallography, students in the chemical sciences are at a disadvantage in understanding the results of not only their own but also others' crystallographic results (Slebodnick, 2021). The course of 15 1-hour lectures includes time spent using the diffractometer in person. Dr. Slebodnick begins by employing the Cambridge Crystallographic Database (CSD) to look at small molecule structures alongside the crystal data tables, connecting the three dimensional structure to crystal information that would appear in a publication. Students are then shown the diffractometer and experience the various steps of data collection and processing. Before turning to any samples from the students' own research, which Dr. Slebodnick notes is the most exciting part for the students, she includes a unit on published structures in the literature aimed at crystallographic literacy and judging crystal structure quality.
Dr. Krystle McLaughlin offers the observation that while macromolecular structures are abundant in undergraduate biochemical curricula, the x-ray crystallographic methods used to determine them for more than half a century are generally not taught below the graduate school level (McLaughlin, 2021). Citing pedagogical research on the impact of genuine research-based exercises on student learning and retention in the sciences, Dr. McLaughlin describes practical strategies for integrating macromolecular x-ray crystallography into the undergraduate teaching curriculum (also see McLaughlin, 2017). She describes using freely available resources such as the RCSB Protein Data Bank and COOT and offers a “CURE,” or Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience where protein structure serves as the theme of the semester-long biochemistry teaching lab.
Whether the experiences are in-person or online, these articles provide inspiring examples of how to effectively accomplish training the next generation in the structural sciences. The authors also share the insight that there is a continued need for increased attention to crystallographic and structural science education. On the bright side in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for remote learning has highlighted the value of online resources, foreshadowing their continued use to supplement in-classroom crystallographic education, from fundamental principles to using crystal structures to understand biological processes.
We thank the contributing authors, as well as the reviewers, journal editors, and staff. We heartily acknowledge 2020 ACA President Dr. Toby and the 2020 Programs Chairs Nozomi Ando and Carla Slebodnick for their support in holding a Transactions Symposium devoted to educational aspects of structural science. Many thanks to 2020 Transactions Symposium sponsors IUCr Journals, Rigaku, and Structural Dynamics.
