BIO. 323 INTRODUCTORY MOLECULAR AND CELL BIOLOGY 002C
LECTURER: Dr. Lisa Dorn
Fall 2007
OFFICE: HS45, LAB: HS47, HS50
PHONE: 3064
E-MAIL: dorn@uwosh.edu.
OFFICE HOURS: 10:20-12:20am Monday & Friday or by appointment.
LECTURE HOURS: 4:10-5:10pm MWF in Halsey Science 175.
TEXT (lecture): Alberts, Bray, Hopkin, Johnson, Lewis, Raff, Roberts,Walter (2004) Essential Cell
Biology, 2nd edition, Garland Science, Taylor and Francis Group, New York & London.
ATTENDANCE POLICY: I will not take role in lecture. Attending lecture and good note-taking skills will
increase your ability to do well in class. I will not repeat lectures nor do I publish lecture notes.
Lec
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Day
Date
Topic
Book
1
Wed
5-Sep
Protein Structure & Function
4
2
Friday
7-Sep
Protein Structure & Function
4
3
Monday
10-Sep
Membrane Structure
11
4
Wed
12-Sep
Membrane Structure
11
5
Friday
14-Sep
Membrane Transport
12
6
Monday
17-Sep
Membrane Transport
12
7
8
Wed
Friday
19-Sep
21-Sep
Membrane Transport
Membrane Transport
12
12
9
Monday
24-Sep
Cell Communication
16
10
Wed
26-Sep
Cell Communication
16
11
Friday
28-Sep
Cell Communication
16
12
Monday
1-Oct
Cell Communication
16
13
Wed
3-Oct
Intracellular Compartments & transport
15
Friday
5-Oct
14
Monday
8-Oct
Exam 1 (lectures 1-12) Handout Paper #1
Intracellular Compartments & transport Discuss
figures in handout
15
15
Wed
10-Oct
Intracellular Compartments & transport Discuss
figures in handout
15
16
Friday
12-Oct
Intracellular Compartments & Transport
15
17
Monday
15-Oct
Cytoskeleton 1st draft due
17
18
Wed
17-Oct
Cytoskeleton
17
19
Friday
19-Oct
Cytoskeleton
17
20
Monday
22-Oct
Cytoskeleton
17
21
Wed
24-Oct
Energetics
14
22
Friday
26-Oct
Energetics
14
23
Monday
29-Oct
Energetics Paper #1 DUE
14
24
Wed
31-Oct
DNA structure and Chromosomes
5
25
Friday
Monday
2-Nov
5-Nov
EXAM #2 (lectures 13-23)
DNA structure and Chromosomes
5
26
Wed
7-Nov
DNA Replication & Repair Handout #2
6
27
Friday
9-Nov
28
Monday
12-Nov
DNA replication and repair
Figures
DNA replication and repair
Figures
29
Wed
14-Nov
DNA Replication and repair
6
30
Friday
16-Nov
Transcription
7
31
Monday
19-Nov
Transcription 1st draft due
7
Wed
21-Nov
Thanksgiving Break
Friday
23-Nov
Thanksgiving Break
32
Monday
26-Nov
Translation
7
33
Wed
28-Nov
Translation
7
34
Friday
30-Nov
Gene Regulation
8
35
Monday
3-Dec
Gene Regulation
8
36
Wed
5-Dec
Gene Regulation Paper Due
8
37
Friday
7-Dec
Gene Regulation
8
Monday
10-Dec
Review
Wed
12-Dec
Exam #3 (Lectures 24 - 37)
Friday
14-Dec
Alternative Exam Date
Discuss
6
Discuss
6
GRADING: Each exam is worth 100 pts, and each paper 50 points for a total of 400 points. 92-100% = A,
89-91 = AB, 82-88 = B, 79-81 = BC, 72-78 = C, 68-71 = CD, 60-67 = D, below 60% = F. Grades will only
be “curved”, if necessary. Cheating in any form (including plagiarism, excessive and/or undocumented
paraphrasing) will NOT be tolerated. Students caught cheating will receive an F in the course and will be
reported to the Dean of Students.
MAKE-UP EXAMS: If you cannot be present for an exam, it is your responsibility to get in touch with me
before the rest of the class writes the exam. Make-up exams will be available only if the student suffers a
life-threatening illness and has a medical excuse to support that claim.
WRITING ASSIGNMENTS:
General Instructions
I will provide you with selected data from the literature that are relevant to theories discussed in class. I will
also devote some lecture time to summarizing some background information, describing the methods and
reviewing the figures that report the results.
Your job while listening to this lecture is to listen for:
1. The hints (sometimes veiled sometimes club-like) that explain the justification for doing this
experiment
2. The hypothesis they are testing.
3. The specific question(s) they asked (not necessarily the same as the hypothesis).
Your job while writing this paper is to:
1. Capture the interest of the reader by developing some background
2. State the hypothesis being tested and the specific questions asked.
3. Explain the significance of the hypothesis tested in your paper (why anyone should care)
4. Explain clearly the results so that the reader understands their meaning and draws the same
conclusions as you.
5. Conclude and Discuss. Were the questions answered? Did they support the hypothesis? Are they a
contribution?
Introduction that gives some background information but mostly outlines questions in the field (that will be
addressed by your data) and the significance of the work presented, i.e. what makes the study important or
why should anyone continue reading. A rationale statement is often useful.
- Results and Discussion: Here you will describe each figure stating which question it addressed and what
to conclude from those data. Do not use the word PROVED, use the word SHOWED. You cannot PROVE
anything because there is always the possibility an untested variable has influenced your result and if you
could control that variable the support or lack of support for your hypothesis might change. To determine
what your data show, relevant to your hypothesis, you may have to explain a bit about the techniques used
and the rationale for the experiment. For instance, you may need to explain why certain controls were done
and why certain experiments followed other experiments etc.
One way to begin…
To determine whether Sodium Hydroxide influenced the precipitation of DNA the authors did blah,
blah, blah. They found blah, blah. To test if sodium hydroxides influence depended on the type of alcohol
used they did blah, blah blah.
Discussion section in which a reasonable new hypothesis for future work is formulated from the data. This
can be very short.
This sounds like a lot of writing, but, in fact, the maximum page length will be no more than two
typewritten, double-spaced pages (font no less than 12 points, and 1 inch margins on left and right). You
may discuss the data (and interpretations of the data) among yourselves. You can also ask me questions,
preferably in class where all can profit from the questions and answers.
WRITING STYLE
I have posted a pdf to the D2L website for this class that contains much more detail on how to write a
science paper and reminders of the usage of such things as effect vs. affect, and other examples of what not
to do but better examples of things to do instead. I highly recommend that you use this booklet while
writing. It was written by Marc E. Tischler PhD, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at
The University of Arizona.
You should have taken Bio 111 or 112 and therefore you should have the book: Writing Papers in the
Biological Sciences by Victoria E. McMillan. This is also a very useful book. Chapter 4 on writing lab
reports and research papers and chapter 7 on drafting and revising may be most useful.
There are three components to effective writing: clarity, concision and precision.
1. Clarity means to write clearly and generally involves good sentence structure.
a. When you are failing in clarity, I will write things like “unclear”, “awkward”, “bad sentence
structure”.
2. Concision means to write only what you need to write. Simply re-reading each sentence with the
goal of eliminating extraneous words can be very helpful. Charles Dickens was paid by the word,
you are not.
a. Here my comments will be simple. Be more concise or I will simply wipe out several words
and/or sentences.
3. Precision means to write exactly what you mean.
a. For instance:
i. “The objective of this Western blot is to show that the antibody only successfully
attaches to AtSTP9 proteins and confirms that it is not going to bind to any others in
plant cells.”
ii. What others? Other proteins? Other AtSTP proteins? Other antibodies? The word
“others” could mean a number of things.
b. Again, not many ways to say “Be more precise”, but I may say “What do you mean?”. I will
try to ask specific questions about your ambiguities if I can figure it out but if it is too
muddled I will simply say “Be more precise.”.
BTW
You could make the sentence above more concise as well. The example sentence has 33 words. I could
reduce this sentence to 18 words. Can you?
One last comment about my comments. If I say “Not bad”, that means pretty good but still needs a bit of
work. It does not mean “not good”. OK, so I should just say “good” but that’s not right either. Not bad
is more efficient than “Good but needs work”.
NUMBER ONE MISTAKE MADE BY STUDENTS:
Writing about what you’re going to write about (metaprose). Just write it.
Now that the authors have determined the cause of blindness in kittens, they then thought they would address
the question of deafness.
Instead write:
After determining the cause of blindness, the authors examined the cause of deafness.
If you can avoid writing more than you need to write, this is an easy assignment.
NUMBER TWO MISTAKE
Passive sentences.
It was shown in figure 2 that the addition of radioactive ATP and cAMP allowed for the 57kd polypeptide to
be phosphorylated allowing the presence of the polypeptide throughout the lane because of the
phosphorylation.
Instead:
Additional radioactive ATP and cAMP led to the phosphorylation of a 57kd polypeptide as indicated by the
presence of the polypeptide throughout lane 3 (Figure 2).
Don’t be afraid to use “I” or “we” or “they” or “the authors”. Many students still think that science writing
is written in third person. It is not. Just take a look through the most recent issue of Science or Nature (both
in the library and online) and you’ll find no one writes in third person any more.
HOWEVER, don’t do backbends to avoid a passive sentence when that is the best way to describe your
thoughts. Passive sentences have fallen into disfavor because they are not as clear as active sentences but
they still have their uses. When your goal is CLARITY, sometimes passive sentences are the best way to
get there. Unless you write absolutely nothing pertaining to the topic then clarity will win the day.
Remember CLARITY, CLARITY, CLARITY.
MISTAKE NUMBER 3:
Your sentence doesn’t say anything.
READ WHAT YOU HAVE WRITTEN OUT LOUD. Does it say what you meant for it to say. Nothing is
more useful then writing aloud, so to speak (pardon the pun). You never really understand your writing until
your ears hear it. The voice inside your head is not as clear as the voice inside your throat.
MISTAKE NUMBER 4: (ACTUALLY SHOULD BE NUMBER 1):
Start too late.
You cannot read your writing aloud at midnight in the computer labs with everyone else writing their papers
right next to you. You cannot take advantage of my help if you do not write a first draft. It’s up to you, it’s
always up to you.