BME 220: Protein Bioinformatics
Journal Clubs

Journal clubs will be given approximately weekly by class members. If you have a particular paper in mind that you'd like to present, come talk to me about it. Otherwise I'll post papers for presentation on the syllabus. We'll try to have two papers and two presenters each week.

Everyone in the class should read the paper before class and come prepared to discuss the paper. You will be graded on both your presentation as well as participation in discussion for you classmates presentations.

In preparing a presentation, imagine that you have received this paper from a editor who has asked you to provide a scientific critique of the paper and evaluation of whether it should be published. You need to assess both the quality and the significance of the work. Your goal is to

• Explain the problem begin addressed; why (or if) it's an interesting problem and the context of this problem in relation to the field.
• Explain the methods used in the paper sufficiently well so that the results can be understood.** Note the limitations or weaknesses of the methods used. Were proper controls done? Were the "right" experiments done to answer the questions address?
• Discuss the results presented by the authors and the conclusions drawn from them. Are the author's conclusions supported by their results?
• Speculate on possible future directions. What should be done next? What conclusions should be experimentally verified?
• Consider the broader implications and significance of this paper. Is it a 'good' paper? Are there other related problems to which these results could be applicable? Have there been different approaches to the same problem? Is this approach better or different? Does it give different results?
• Learn, and teach the class, something about this topic.

Preparing a presentaion will generally require that you read papers in addition to the paper you are presenting. You may need to read some references cited in the article (or use PubMed to find references or reviews) in order to understand the background material. If the paper is an older one, check the ISI Web of Science to find more recent papers that have cited your article. What implications did this paper have for the field?

**Talk to me if you're unclear on the extent to which you need to explain methods. For example, the first two papers present various kinds of spectroscopy results, but I don't expect you to explain how NMR works.

Schedule

If we need additional slots for presentations, they'll be added on February 20 and January 23.