BCMB 609

Plant Biology Journal Club

Paper Selection:

Any area of plant biology from organismal physiology down to biochemistry can be explored in this journal club. The only real restriction is that the paper you chose cannot come from your current (or former) lab or from a direct competitor. In other words, you have to pick a paper that is not too closely related to your own work.

Within these constraints you can select any research paper from any journal (as long as some standard of quality is maintained) that is of interest to you and (hopefully) to other people. A list of journals that can provide such articles is given below. Some of the criteria to look out for are

• Is this paper addressing an interesting biological problem?
  • Papers that fill in the little details that everyone had been suspecting for many years are usually not very exciting.
• Do we learn something new about how plants are functioning?
  • Sometimes it is interesting to describe a new phenomenon, but usually we want to get some mechanistic insight into how things are working.
• Is the paper understandable to the general scientist?
  • There are excellent papers out there that only experts in the field can understand since the authors never bothered to explain things properly.
• Are the experimental methods explained sufficiently?
  • We want to understand not only what the authors are concluding, but also how they arrived at their conclusions.
• Does this paper represent the current "state of the art"?
  • It doesn't make much sense to dicuss a paper when many of the questions left open by it have been answered in the meantime.

As a starting point you can use the expertise of "experts" in the field. For example, the reviews in Current Opinion in Plant Biology mark certain papers as "of outstanding interest" and even give a (brief) explanation why this paper is important. Or you can search the Faculty of 1000 web site where other scientists highlight certain papers that they think are particularly valuable.

Every student is expected to provide three (3) viable papers within the first two (2) weeks of the semester to the instructor, combined with a short description of (a) why they are interesting and (b) which one of the three would be the best candidate for the journal club.

Paper Presentation

The paper presentation has to include an introduction into the biological question that the authors are trying to address.

In general, you will want to introduce each experiment by stating the question (or hypothesis) they are trying to address. This should be followed by a brief description of the results and the conclusion(s) that the authors derive from these results; do these conclusions answer their original question? Finally, you should include a future work section where you outline what you think the open questions are, or which kind of experiments the authors might want to do next.

If the authors are using "unusual" experimental approaches to reach their conclusions, you have to include an outline for how this experiment is done and what can be concluded (or not concluded) from it. The question of what constitutes an "unusual" experiment is difficult to answer, but you definitely have to be prepared to explain all experiments described in the paper.

For long papers, it may be helpful to limit your presentation to the most important figures (and keep the others as backup in your file) so we have more time for discussions.

The total time of the presentation (without questions) should be no more than 30 minutes.

It is easiest to download the figures from the journal web site and import them into Powerpoint (or Keynote...). Please note that there are often different versions of the figures available. Make sure you get one that has sufficient resolution for a presentation on the big screen.

Suggested Journals:

Plant-specific Journals:

Plant Cell
Plant Journal
Plant Physiology
Planta
Plant & Cell Physiology
Plant Physiology and Biochemistry
Journal of Experimental Botany
Plant Molecular Biology

General (and other) Journals:

Nature
Science
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Current Biology
EMBO Journal
Cell
Journal of Cell Biology
Development
Genes and Development
Journal of Biochemistry

A good starting point to look for "interesting topics" can be found in review journals such as these:

Trends in Plant Science
Current Opinion in Plant Biology
Faculty of 1000 (this is not a journal but a collection of opinions about "good" papers)

If any of these links do not get you to downloadable articles, you may have to go through the library web site and link to the journal from there.

page last updated on 110818