Short Weekly Assignments
To facilitate the discussion, each student will email three questions to the instructor, at least one about each of the two assigned papers, the day before the class. The questions may be about the data, experimental design and methods, or authors' interpretation of the results. These questions will be considered during the discussions in class.
Midterm Written Assignment
You will be provided with relevant parts of a research paper (materials and methods, figures, tables and results) minus the title and abstract. Using your knowledge, compose an original title and a 400–500 word abstract to describe the paper. Your abstract should be concise, must summarize the major results of the research paper in a language that non-specialists can understand, and should clearly state the significance and broader impact of the findings. This title and abstract must be your original work, and should not be a copy of the published title and abstract (i.e. do not search literature databases for them). The most important component of this assignment is your critical thinking and interpretation of the conclusions that can be drawn from the data/experiments described in the paper.
Oral Presentation
By the end of this course, you should be able to freely browse the primary research literature and critically analyze experiments, results, and conclusions. To consolidate these skills, you will select an article (of your choice) from a list of primary research articles (provided by the instructor) related to cellular regulation of protein misfolding and degradation and critically analyze the article in a 15 minute presentation to the class.
The presentation must highlight the relevance of the paper to intracellular protein misfolding, the rationale of the experiments and approach, the results, and the overall conclusions. In your presentation you should communicate your critical assessment, rather than a summary, of the data/figures. You should identify and discuss the key figure or table in the paper and the key control for that experiment, why you think that the conclusions of the paper are supported by the data, or if an alternate explanation is possible.