As part of my curriculum as an Industrial Biotechnology student, I have to do an internship this semmester in a biotech company. I’m doing my internship at the Bioprocess Development and Training Complex, also known as BDTC. The mission of the BDTC is to promote the growth of the biotechnology industry in Puerto Rico and the Americas by: 

  • Providing biotechnology education and training
  • Offering bioprocess development and technical support, and
  • fostering innovation through research and development
By working at BDTC, I will be trained in the technique of capillary electrophoresis (CE) and this will provide me the opportunity to enhance my previous knowledge in protein characterization. CE technology has been valuable for the comprehensive characterization of macromolecules used both as biologics and in proteomic study. The analysis of proteins at a proteome level involves not only the characterization and quantification of proteins, but also the study of interactions between proteins with other proteins, nucleic acids and small molecules.  At the end of the internship I will be able to generate SOP’s for the different applications such as SDS-Gel Molecular Weight Analysis, Isoelectric Focusing Analysis, and Carbohydrate Analysis Peptide Mapping applying my experience in experimental procedure development.
This is a completely different and exciting new kind of science for me just for the fact of being in an industrial atmosphere. I’m looking forward to learn as much as I can on developing SOPs and validating pocedures, and most importantly learning to collaborate and work with my colleagues in Industry. I’m also looking forward learning to use high tech equipment to perform scietific research on a larger scale. I’m going to be trainined not only on CE, but on TFF, bacterial cultures in bioreactors and high throughput protein characterization and isolation.