Rudlaff, R. | bioRxiv Science

bioRxiv2024

Career Navigator: An online platform to streamline professional development and career education for graduate bioscientists

Graduate professional development is a highly dynamic enterprise that prepares graduate students for personal and career success in a variety of fields, including the biosciences. National policies, funding awards, and institutional programs have generated myriad tools and services for graduate bioscience students, including new learning resources, events, connections to prospective employers, and opportunities to strengthen academic and professional portfolios. These interventions are welcome and have done much to enhance graduate bioscience training, but they may also be overwhelming for trainees. To streamline professional development and career education information for the bioscience graduate students at our institution, we tested a model where we built a centralized web portal of career development resources. Here we present our strategy and best practices for website design. We show data that students preferred a centralized online portal over other forms of resource communication; that programming, paired communication and environmental factors (e.g. remote learning and work as in the COVID-19 pandemic) combined to increase sustained engagement with the site; and that harnessing website analytics is an effective way to measure site utilization and generate insights on programming and resource development. This data, in turn, fits into broader priorities to evaluate interventions in graduate bioscience education.

scientific communication and education↗

bioRxiv2020

Versatile labeling and detection ofendogenous proteins using tag-assistedsplit enzyme complementation

Recent advances in genome engineering have expanded our capabilities to study proteins in their natural states. In particular, the ease and scalability of knocking-in small peptide tags has enabled high throughput tagging and analysis of endogenous proteins. To improve enrichment capacities and expand the functionality of knock-ins using short tags, we developed the tag-assisted split enzyme complementation (TASEC) approach, which uses two orthogonal small peptide tags and their cognate binders to conditionally drive complementation of a split enzyme upon labeled protein expression. Using this approach, we have engineered and optimized the tag-assisted split HaloTag complementation system (TA-splitHalo) and demonstrated its versatile applications in improving the efficiency of knock-in cell enrichment, detection of protein-protein interaction, and isolation of biallelic gene edited cells through multiplexing.

bioengineering↗