12/3/07       Instructions & Guidelines for BCB 544 Team Projects

 

Deadlines & Presentation Dates (Group assignments & dates below)

 

  • Written project reports due Fri Dec 7 by Midnight
  • Oral Presentations in class on Dec 5 and 7

 

Presentation Schedule:

 

Wednesday, Dec 5th         

  • Xiong and Devin (~20 minutes)
  • Tonia (10-15 minutes)

 

Friday, Dec 7th

  • Kendra and Drew (~20 minutes)
  • Addie (10-15 minutes)

 

 

IMPORTANT!

 

All Students (444 & 544) are required to attend all BCB 544 project presentations next week - attendance will be taken!

 

HW#7:  Project Presentation Evaluations

Total of 4 forms, due in class, immediately after each presentation

 

 

BCB 544 Project Report:  Oral portion

 

1.  Each oral presentation will be 25-30' long; with 10' at end for questions (we will use a timer)

2. Every member of each group must speak, but different students may speak for different lengths of time

3. Each oral presentation will be a PPT presentation with < 40 slides (or you may use HTML if you prefer)

4. Each group is responsible for providing PPTs to Drena or Michael (depending on whether you prefer Mac or PC) at least 1 hour prior to the presentation.  We will provide a USB drive to facilitate this.

5. Here is a presentation for how to give a good talk by Simon Peyton Jones.

6. The seminar evaluation form is available to give you an idea of what criteria will be used to evaluate your presentation.

 

BCB 544 Project Report: Written portion - Content

 

Each written project report should include:]

1.   Title of project

2.   Names of project members

3.   Biological problem investigated (Introduction, Background & Significance, State the Question, Hypothesis or Problem addressed)       

4.   Computational issues addressed (Explain what new algorithm/tool you developed OR what available tools you used/modified in order to address the biological question)

5.   Results (Concisely summarize your results, use Tables & Figures to present data.)

6.   Conclusions & Significance (What do your results mean?  Did you answer the question you set out to answer?  What is the significance of your results or of the new tools or of the new results obtained using available tools presented in your work? What are next steps/future directions?

7. Authors' Contributions  (What did each team member do?  Whose idea was the project? Who did the programming?  Who ran the experiments?  Who analyzed the results?  Who wrote and/or proofread the report?  Who prepared the PPTs slides? etc.)

 

BCB 544 Project Report:  Written portion - Format

 

We believe it will be most useful for you to write your project report in the format of a manuscript for submission to the journal Bioinformatics.  This will be great practice for you, makes our task of fairly comparing projects easier - and who knows - perhaps this will be a first draft of a paper you will actually submit!

 

Our expectations are:

 

1.  Each group will prepare a single manuscript in Bioinformatics format, with papers adhering to guidelines for “Discovery Note” papers in Bioinformatics - except that the number of Tables and Figures is not limited to 1 or 2. See brief description provided below & examples in the journal.

 

2. Papers will not exceed 3000 words

 

3. Papers will be formatted according to the requirements described here: 

        http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcbioinformatics/ifora/

 

4.  Items 1-7 listed under "Content" above should be incorporated into standard manuscript sections:

 

Title page

Abstract

Background

Results

Discussion

Conclusions

System and Methods (datasets, software, algorithms, implementation and/or biological system, experimental methods)

Authors' Contributions

References

 

 

   4.1  Follow the instructions under "Preparing main manuscript text" at above website for formatting instructions for references, etc. 

 

   4.2 Place each Figure or Table, together with its legend, on a separate page at the end of the text

       (i.e., don't spend time trying to insert figures into text portion of manuscript!  - also, again, you may include more than 2 Tables/Figures.)

 

NOTE:  It is NOT necessary (or even desirable) to use the Word or LATEX "templates" provided. We want you to spend time on content, not formatting!!

 

5.  Papers must be submitted both electronically (to terrible@iastate.edu) and in 1 hard copy to Drena.

 

6.  Supplemental information may be provided online.   Include the URLs in your manuscript.

 

 

To assist you in ideas for projects and scope, here are the titles of projects from students in this class over the last two years:

 

Comparison of approaches for determining phylogenetic relationships (in turtles & salamanders), including evaluation of high performance computing mechanisms 

Phylogenetic relationships among Rec A gene family members, esp. in maize

Identification of genetic differences that determine ability of Campylobacter strains to colonize turkey intestine

Identification of genes that restore complement-resistance in attenuated Leishmania strains

Microarray & functional genomics analyses of phenol-induced proteins in Pseudomonas

Proteomic & functional/structural genomics analyses of proteins expressed in developing retina

Bioinformatic analyses of Lipcalin 2: structure, function, phylogeny

‘Adaptive Thresholding’ Technique for Exon Prediction

Genome-wide searching for the tandem/inverted duplicated genes in Arabidopsis

Sequence-based Prediction of Protein-Ligand Interactions

Localized Tertiary Protein Structure Prediction

Investigation into the use of RNAi to prevent HIV infection