Written Assignment (Due Week 7)
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 or modification 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.
End of Term Oral Presentation (Presented in the Final Class Meeting)
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 from a list of primary research articles (provided by the instructors) related to host-virus interactions and critically analyze the article in a 20 minute presentation (about 15 slides) to the class. The presentation must highlight the relevance of the paper to virus invasion of the host cell by immune evasion, the rationale of the experiments and approach, the experiments and controls, any missing experimental controls, the results, and the overall conclusions. In your presentation you should communicate your critical assessment of the paper rather than present a summary of the data/figures. You should explicitly 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 what alternate explanations are possible.