Scientific Background:

Rubric for Scientific Background

Template T2

Detail:

Using the primary literature and other electronic resources

New advances in science are usually based on prior work, by others in the form of the peer reviewed and published scientific literature, or in the form of preliminary results or meta data analysis of information in various data bases. New ideas, new interpretations and new hypotheses emerge from the thoughtful analysis of data that you have collected, or what others have done.

A scientifically literate student should be able to:

Access and assess peer reviewed scientific literature: 

Be able to efficiently  read a paper  and be able to discuss

Big Picture Aspects

1. Read the title- what does just reading the title tell you?

2. Read the Abstract- what does the abstract tell you?

 The context and background to the presented research.

This is usually contained in the Introduction section of the publication

From the Introduction you should be able to describe  1 What is the context of the paper  and 2 What work by others is critical to the current paper: identify the names of senior authors on important references  3. Summarize the Big Picture aspect of the work  and 4. What is the central hypothesis that is to be tested

From the Materials, Methods and Results Sections:

you should be able to identify preparative experiments necessary to obtain the materials to perform the experiments that will test the hypothesis.  Understand the basis of the experiments, look at quantitative aspects of the experiments, how much protein is needed etc, how do they establish purity, quantitation etc

What are the critical experiments that test the hypothesis

What is the basis for the experiment, what is measured, is it a direct or indirect measurement

Which are the most important figures or tables in the paper

What is displayed in the figure, what are the axes- how is the dependent variable measured?, what are the units etc

From the Discussion and Conclusions sections

What are the major conclusions reached

What evidence are the major conclusions based upon

You should look for a discussion of the reproducibility of the experimental data and how might this affect the conclusions that will be reached for each experiment? You should be able to identify the controls that are used, and what are the potential pitfalls of the techniques used

Finally, you should look to see if the next logical steps in the research are suggested by the authors  and what other questions/experiments do these results suggest to you. 

Should be familiar with and be able to use other Electronic Resources: to Find General Information about an Enzyme or Enzyme Family

Find, use and present relevant primary literature, protein sequences, structures and bioinformatics tools 

Should be able to use Molecular Visualization and Computational Approaches (Data Mining)