Students are expected to read the assigned chapter from Alberts et al. in advance of the each lecture. We will cover approximately one chapter per week.
Each week, the instructor will present 2 lectures of background and on Fridays a team of two to three students will present a current paper from a scientific journal. The presenters (aided by the instructor) will also be responsible for generating a problem set for the rest of the class to guide their reading of the paper. Problems and papers for discussion will be distributed on the Friday prior to the presentation. Grades will be based on weekly problem sets (100 points), an oral presentation (100 points) and a final research proposal (100 points).
Problem sets will be distributed on Fridays and due before class on the following Friday. Problems will cover chapter material and background topics for the week’s presentation.
Oral presentations will be on Fridays. The presenting team, in consultation with the instructor will choose an appropriate journal article and provide a list of basic questions at least one week prior to the presentation. The other members of the class will need to read the paper to answer these questions in advance of the presentation. Along with the paper, the presenting team should be prepared to propose several follow-up experiments. These will be discussed in class and form the basis for the research proposal that is the final project for the class. A one-page outline of the research proposal will be due one week after the presentation.
Research proposals will be due before Thanksgiving so that we can do peer review in the last week of class. Final revisions will be due on Tues Dec 5 (Normal Exam Time for 11am MWF classes). Undergraduate proposals will be limited to five pages in length while graduate students will prepare a full proposal for a postdoctoral fellowship in the NIH format (Plain Text | MSWord Doc | PDF | Official Forms and Instructions at NIH ).
Final grades will be calculated on the basis of your best ten 10-point problem sets (out of 12 or 13), 100-points for the presentation and a 100-point final project. Scores above 90% are guaranteed A, 80 - 90% B, 70- 80% C, 60 - 70% D. If the class average is less than 80%, the average will determine the B/C boundary, with the A/B cut-off 1 standard deviation higher, the C/D cut-off 1 standard deviation lower, and the D/F boundary 2 standard deviations below the mean.
General strategy for finding an appropriate paper for presentation.
Relevant Journals that are available online through the UM library.
Last year's course pages - Chem 580 Fall 2007.
Adobe PDF viewer is required for viewing pdf lecture notes. You can download the Free Acrobat Viewer from the Adobe website.
The National Center for Biotechnology Information at the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health is a great resource for Biomedical Literature searches, as well as Genome, Nucleotide or Protein Sequence information and Macromolecular Structure.