Assignment:

• You MUST read each assigned paper before class.
• Each week, students are expected to hand in a question about the paper at the beginning of the class period. The goals of having you come to class prepared with a question are to strongly encourage you to understand the paper as best as you can and to facilitate class discussion. Therefore, the question should be about the science presented in the paper and should represent the fact that you have read the paper and thought about the information it contains. For example, you may have a question about a control experiment that is missing or an assumption that was made in interpreting the data. An inappropriate question would be: "How do you do bisulfite mutagenesis (or any other technique)?" since this will not indicate whether you have actually attempted to understand the paper.
• Students who are presenting the paper do not need to bring in a question for that week.

As a reader:

• While reading the abstract and introduction, try to determine what question the researchers are asking and why they got interested in this question.
• For each experiment described in the results, think about what the researchers were asking and how they tried to answer the question experimentally.
• LOOK AT THE FIGURES!!! When a figure is refered to in the text, turn your attention to the figure. Read the figure legend. If necessary, read the materials and methods section. Try to interpret the data presented in the figure on your own. Go back to the text and re-read the relevant section, and then look at the figure again.
• Draw a conclusion from each experiment presented. In other words, after you read about each experiment, ask the question: "What conclusion did the researchers draw from this experiment?"
• When reading the discussion, pay particular attention to any controversies the authors mention. Decide for yourself if the proposed interpretations and models are supported by the data in the paper.
• FEEL FREE TO BE CRITICAL! The fact that a paper has been published does not mean that the information it contains is always accurate. You may not agree with every interpretation or conclusion. You may think that important experiments are missing. It can be a lot of fun to "rip apart" a paper.

As a student presenter:

• You and your partner are expected to prepare a 20 minute presentation on your assigned paper (see below). For the remaining class time, you will lead a discussion of the paper with the other students in the class. (Remember: each student will come to class with a question about the paper, so there should be plenty of questions for discussion.)
• You will be responsible for presenting sufficient background information so that the rest of the students in the class can put the paper into an appropriate context. In other words, you will want to present information relating to why these researchers were working on this project - what interesting question were they asking?
• You will then present the paper, focusing on the experiments performed. Generally, data from most (or all) of the experiments will be presented in figures. You should have overheads or powerpoint slides of the figures to display for the class, so that while you are discussing the data, you can point out relevant portions of the figure.
• You should be prepared to explain the questions asked by the researchers, the experimental approaches they took to address these questions and their interpretation of the data.
• If you have any trouble understanding your paper PRIOR to your presentation, please feel free to come and talk to me about it. I will do my best to answer any questions that you have.

I have specifically chosen some older, "classic" molecular biology papers as well as some more current papers. The older papers were chosen as representatives of landmark experiments and interesting techniques. The more recent papers illustrate research topics that are of current interest.

Enjoy the readings!