BMOL3402-Molecular Biology and Genomics – Medical Science Assignment Help

Task

Molecular Biology and Genomics

The ability to introduce precise changes into DNA is an essential and widely used process in contemporary molecular biology. It is commonly employed to introduce defined changes into gene coding sequences and regulatory regions. This is extremely useful for identifying important components of proteins and promoters. It is also used as an aid to understanding genetic processes including DNA conformational analysis and the functioning of transposition and sitespecific recombination.

Currently, the most simple, versatile, and precise method for genetic manipulation is CRISPR-Cas technology, an adaptation from the prokaryotic adaptive immune system. CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspace Short Palindromic Repeats) are repetitive elements that are present throughout bacterial and archaeal diversity. They locate adjacent to very well conserved CRISPRassociated (cas) genes, which encode for the endonucleases known as Cas. By 2010, the basic function and mechanism of CRISPR-Cas systems were established. In 2013, the newly developed CRISPR-Cas9 technology successfully accomplished genome editing in mammalian cells and quickly became one of the most powerful tools in genetic engineering.

Practical reports

Practical reports in this unit need to be written in the form of a scientific journal article. Understanding how journal articles are structured and written is an essential skill in a scientific career; whether you need to write or read journal articles. The word limit for each practical report is (details below). Learning to write concisely is an important skill.

Ultimately, in these reports we want to see that you understand the theory behind the experiment, what the results mean and why the experiment/methodology is important. Reading published scientific papers is the best way to learn about how scientific papers are presented and will help you understand the theoretical background of the experiments. The unit convenors, Professor Ian Paulsen and Professor Paul Haynes, are available each week in the practical classes. Please use the practical sessions to ask questions about the practicals, the theory behind the experiments or submission of the practical reports.

Journal articles traditionally have these sections: Abstract, Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results, Discussion and References. Information about what is included in each of these sections and what we expect is outlined below.

Abstract
The abstract is a summary of the whole article (abstracts do not contain references). Write this section last you need to know what is in the report before you can write a summary of it. A good place to start is one sentence summarising each section of the report, then add information to join the sentences to make it read smoothly. 

Introduction
The Introduction contains a few paragraphs giving the background so the reader can understand why you did the experiment and why it’s interesting. Don’t include very basic information – there is a level of assumed knowledge for a scientific journal article – for example, you don’t need to explain what DNA is, or how Sanger sequencing works. The start of the Introduction has broad context for the topic of your practical report. This could be a very brief introduction to the topic and some examples of the research applications of the methodology/genes/proteins used in your experiment – what you focus on here depends on what the overall topic of your experiment.

Next you need to introduce the specific concepts that relate to this experiment – this should contain just enough information that another scientist can understand the Results and Discussion sections. What are the important factors for studies of this type? What is important for the reader to know to understand why the experiment was designed this way or why you used these particular methodologies/genes/proteins?

The last paragraph of the Introduction contains the aim of the experiment. The aim is an overall concept for the experiment – it is more than just a step-by-step summary of what you did. Figures could be included that relate to the content in the Introduction. All figures must be accompanied by some explanatory text (more than just the legend or the title) – the reader shouldn’t have to guess why a figure has been included. Please also see the general information below about including figures in your practical reports.

Materials and Methods
This section is NOT written like a protocol. This is a concise summary of what is done with enough information to allow another scientist to repeat the experiment, but NOT a step-by-step process of what  you did. ALL steps in the experiment need to be included in the Methods section, including the ones completed by the class technician, not just the ones you completed. Do NOT reference your practical manual. If you want to reference a method, you need to find a peerreviewed paper that contains the details of that method.

Results
The Results section contains the observations and data from your experiments. The Results section must contain some text, but it can be concise – it just needs to be long enough to give the necessary information. The Results section does NOT contain interpretation of the results – all interpretation goes in the Discussion section (see below for more information on what is interpretation).
This section can include figures and tables. All figures and tables must be accompanied by some explanatory text (more than just the legend or the title) – the reader shouldn’t have to guess why a figure has been included. Please also see the general information below about including figures in your practical reports.

Discussion
The overall aim of the Discussion is to place your results in the context of previously published work. The Discussion is normally a few paragraphs in length. The Results and Discussion sections can be combined, but they can also be separate – it’s your choice about how you want to present your report. This section should start with the interpretation of the results. What do the results mean? What evidence is there of success or failure? If there were any failures, can you identify where you went wrong? What would you do next time to catch or prevent these failures?

Next you should compare your results to those from other published papers. It is up to you to find papers that you can compare your results to and work out how many comparisons are an appropriate amount. Before writing a comparison of results, check the methods to see where there are differences between your experiment and the published one and think about what any differences mean for the comparison with your experiment.

The last part of the Discussion is broader – it is about the wider context for the study. The direction you take your Discussion is up to what you find interesting – we hope to learn something when we read your reports. For example, you could: discuss improvements to the methodologies used, further work that could be done to extend this research, discuss the organisms or genes used in your experiment, talk about alternate methods/organisms/genes to the ones you used and why they would be better, or discuss the results of other studies that used the same techniques. There may be other topics relating to your experiment that you find interesting that we haven’t mentioned here. You don’t have to include all these things in your report, these are just some ideas to get you thinking about what to include.

The last paragraph of the Discussion is a concluding paragraph that sums up your practical report. Figures could be included that relate to the content in the Discussion. All figures must be accompanied by some explanatory text (more than just the legend or the title) – the reader shouldn’t have to guess why a figure has been included. Please also see the general information below about including figures in your practical reports.