Finishing my project has definitely been a challenge and a struggle, but here it is!
Creating the summary, I chose to leave out many details to make room for a little humor and to give the summary a certain lightness. It is meant to be an overview of the flow throughout the project to motivate people to read it, as many of the questions that I think will arise are answered in the paper itself.
So, what did I learn?
I gained a lot of insight into the process of creating knockout mice and how to do gene expression analysis in embryos. We have looked at several such analyses in the course, so it is interesting to finally understand the molecular biology behind it.
The project made me reflect a great deal on what qualities I see in a good research (hence my latest post). During the initial research phase, searching for my question, my primary focus was that it should be interesting – which is by no means equivalent to useful! As a result, I changed or modified my question numerous times while writing the project. Lesson learned – you can’t get research funds just to entertain yourself, you have to contribute.
Final project:
Annotated bibliography:
Draft for peer review (11/20-2016):
A lot has changed in this draft compared to the initial outline. I decided to change my experiment from a reporter assay to a knockout assay, and I learned A LOT about creating knockout mice writing this draft.
First outline (10/27-16) with comments:
Developing this first outline, I gained a great respect for the process of identifying new, testable questions. It is not as easy as it sounds!
I definitely improved my skills at navigating PubMed. The functions “cited by” and “similar articles” are really good tools for gaining an understanding of where the research is at present.