It’s just a trend


The first few weeks of 20.109 were very fun – although four hours of lab can sometimes be exhausting (not to mention the dehydration/dire need for chapstick).


There were also a few days in which we were very pressed for time...


But after several weeks of work, we were ready to find out whether our ligands were binders! When you finally analyze data that you have been excitedly waiting on for weeks, the last thing you want to hear from your lab partner is “…annnnddd this one is not significant either”. Unfortunately, for many of us, this turned out to be the case for our secondary assays. While not having significant results may be a bummer at first, the real hard part comes in when trying to understand why you got the results that you did (negative specific activities?!) and write a paper about said results.



When my lab partner and I sat down to write our Module 1 summary, we had no idea how to write a paper with no significant results - "Small molecules with nitrogen rings show nothing. Nothing at all" was my first title idea. Okay, not actually, but you understand. Finally, we realized that we were going to have to write this paper so we may as well pick a message and get on with it. I think the hardest part of writing this paper was probably deciding how we would present our insignificant data with a clear message. Once we figured that out, we then had to interpret our results. Time and time again, we had to remind ourselves that we were talking about trends, not conclusive results.


Aside from the struggles of learning how to analyze and present insignificant data, learning good scientific writing practices was also hard. This type of writing was very new to me and definitely took a while to get used to. As much as I hate to admit it, the homework helped a ton with writing good figures and captions, and the Comm Lab workshops were also quite informative.

In the next module, we will pray for significant results, but now we know how to deal with insignificant results if we get them. Results are results, right? In the next module, I want to take advantage of the Comm Lab resources more, as I am sure they have seen all kinds of results and have good suggestions for how to present them.

Here's to Mod 2 and whatever results come along with it!
-Abby McGee

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