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For
this project, student groups role-play a team of research scientists invited
to author a current review article on a human disease for a leading journal.
The underlying goal is to develop the ability to comprehensively integrate
cell/molecular research on a specific topic by synthesizing information
from several primary research articles. Researching a human disease holds
immediate interest for students, especially if they get to choose the disease.
Students submit a research review article for publication in an “in-house”
review journal. Strongly influenced by the real life sciences reviews journal
Trends in Biochemical Sciences and its sister publications (publishers:
Elsevier Science), I have named this mock journal “Trends in Diseased Cells
(TIDS)” and serve as its editor. In writing co-authored 4000-word review
articles, students must consult and cite at least 20 other papers (of which,
at least half must be primary articles). I provide detailed written instructions
for submission, which specify format and layout of paper for the authors.
Key to this paper is a section on “current research” which must identify
and present 3-4 heavily investigated areas of cell/molecular research on
the disease, for each of which between 2-5 primary papers must be summarized.
Each paper must also include two figures that represent a biological model
for disease and illustrate underlying molecular mechanisms supported by
current research. Groups also submit a research abstracts page, which
is simply the combination of the abstract summary and one of the two models
from the paper. All abstract pages are compiled into a second publication,
“The Abstracts Book”. I provide a list of diseases for which tremendous
progress has been made in the past five years at the molecular level, but
students can pick others.
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