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?

Class Responses

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

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.

James C. Clements' Journal Entry

1. What was the purpose of this assignment? - 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. What aspect of this assignment came most easily to you? - finding definitions for the the vocabulary; mind you, not all of the terms were readily available.
3. What aspect of this assignment was the most challenging for you? - 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? - 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.

Alondra Vega's Journal Entry

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.