BIOL398-01/S11:Class Journal Week 2

Instructions
Answer the following questions after you have completed the individual assignment.


 * 1) What was the purpose of this assignment?
 * 2) What aspect of this assignment came most easily to you?
 * 3) What aspect of this assignment was the most challenging for you?
 * 4) What (yet) do you not understand?

Sarah Carratt's Journal Entry

 * 1) The purpose of this assignment was to give us practice reading a scientific article and help us to understand how data is analyzed and presented.
 * 2) The easiest part of this assignment was the vocabulary, and I could figure out most words from the context of the article.
 * 3) The hardest part of the assignment was keeping track of the numbers, enzymes, chemicals, ect. It was hard to discern what was increasing and decreasing and what the units meant.
 * 4) I still am struggling to understand the exact results. I think I get the general idea, but the numbers are foreign to me. The figures are slightly better, but it is frustrating to not understand this article in the fullest.

Sarah Carratt 05:13, 21 January 2011 (EST)

Carmen E. Castaneda's Journal Entry
Carmen E. Castaneda 00:56, 24 January 2011 (EST)
 * 1) The purpose of this assignment was to help us familiarize ourselves with what is expected of us to do for a journal club. It was also a way for us to get our feet wet and begin reading biology papers on the subject material we will conver in this class
 * 2) The easiest part of the assignment would probably be looking oup the definition to the ten words I didn't understand from the article because it just required me to look up the definition and try to make sense of what it was trying to say.
 * 3) The most challenging aspect of the assignment was creating the outline for the article since it was the first time I ever wrote one for Biology.
 * 4) I still don't understand what went on in the experiment. I don't understand the actual process, I think I have a very general understanding of what they did to study the changes caused by the different ammonia concentration to the Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

James C. Clements' Journal Entry
James C. Clements 00:40, 24 January 2011 (EST)
 * 1) To become familiar with the article which will soon be discussed; to learn any unknown terms that it uses and to gain exposure to the methodology. (Perhaps so that we can eventually model this system?)
 * 2) Finding definitions for the the vocabulary; not all of the terms were readily available, but it wasn't too difficult to understand the terms after some minor reading.
 * 3) Outlining the article: I understand the format that was used was devised to split things up into categories, but it made certain aspects of the paper difficult to keep track of.
 * 4) What (yet) do you not understand?
 * 5) * Why was this published in the Journal of Bacteriology? This doesn't seem like a very suitable place for an article about eukaryotic acquisition of nitrogen
 * 6) * Also the data points for glutamate and glutamine have a sharp drop on the last data point. What could have caused this?

Nicholas A. Rohacz's Journal Entry

 * 1) The purpose of this assignment was to give us practice in analyzing a scientific paper and focus on understanding the concepts so that we are able to explain what is going on in the article.
 * 2) The physiological parameters was the easiest section to understand in the paper, only because I have already had previous experience handling these concepts in labs I have worked in.
 * 3) The most challenging aspect of this paper to me was trying to form a mental picture about what was happening all while I was reading.
 * 4) The things I still don't understand at this point and time is the whole picture of the enzyme pathway. I will continue to go over it and try and draw out my own picture, if I have no luck I hope to go over this in class.

Nicholas A. Rohacz 01:56, 24 January 2011 (EST)

Alondra Vega's Journal Entry
Alondra Vega 23:44, 23 January 2011 (EST)
 * 1) The purpose of this assignment was to learn how to read a scientific paper. It is usually hard for many undergraduates to fully understand a scientific text, but starting off with a small paper like this should help with the transition from textbook literature to research literature.
 * 2) The aspect that came most easily to me was looking up the terms to fully understand the article. Once the vocabulary list came together, the paper made a lot more sense.
 * 3) The hardest part of this assignment was figuring out what all the figures meant and how it comes together to form a bigger picture. Keeping track of all the genes and enzymes was not making it any easier.  I feel that even though the paper was focused on ammonia concentrations, there were so many things in the background that I could not quite understand.
 * 4) I do not understand the full text yet. I still cannot quite connect all the dots.