• • 1. You have now spent almost two weeks tackling the issue of caste differentiation in honeybees. Is there anything that you learned throughout this ‘unit’, which you had not learned before? If so, briefly describe it; if there is nothing new, it is OK to say so.
       • I feel like everything was pretty new for me content wise with my case study paper, which is on the effect of miRNA on honey bee caste determination. One of the novel things that I encountered was learning how to describe a “just look experiment”. I had a formula in my mind that if it’s an adding experiment, then I would conclude that whatever is added is “sufficient to result in” something. If it’s a knock out experiment, then I would conclude that whatever that was knocked out is “necessary to result in” something. We were able to describe the data as well as what we can infer from the data by extensively looking back and forth of the explanation provided in the paper and the data. I’m not sure if I would have been able to come to the same answers without the help of the text. I think it might something that I should try to work on in order to prepare for the midterm.
       • Other things that I have learned: how a bioinformatics project of this kind is done (examining differential expression to figure out which miRNA might be important in caste determination, predicting what function they might have, and etc.) and that there are many different kinds of bioinformatics in biology. It was fun to have a discussion with my lab partner Shannah about what I know about bioinformatics (finding the function of  a gene) and what she knows about bioinformatics (related to computational biology and phylogenetics).
    2. What skills do you find that *you* have been using/practicing so far in this unit? Outside this unit and this class, do you think they may be useful skills to have
       • Skill: reflecting on what I didn’t do well in the past and improving for the next one
       • I received feedback on quiz 2 that I should include numbers and amounts when I describe the data. I practiced to incorporate numbers when doing the stage 1 assignment, and I was happy to receive a positive feedback about it! I think this skill is very important not only in academics but in life in general – to learn from mistakes 🙂
       • Skill: practicing presenting my ideas and trying to understand what others say

3. Thinking about challenges throughout this unit, do you find that they are similar to those you described in your previous DocuLearn assignment, or similar to the ones you were anticipating in your first DocuLearn assignment

•  Summary of challenges: (1) reading journals and review articles (2) asking effective/ scientific questions to improve my understanding on the topic (3) following through the lecture material and extracting (?) information that is useful during discussion
• (1) I think this is a less of a challenge than I anticipated! The honeybee paper was not as challenging as I thought it would be after having read through it a couple of times. Discussing with my partner and asking/answering questions to each other helped us fill in the gaps to understand the paper.
• (2) I think this is still might be a challenge, but I am glad to have gotten more practice on this
• (3) The integrative summary was a good practice for this. I think it still is a challenge.