The Reality of 20.109

I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one, but I felt that 20.109 was harder than I expected. What threw me off was not the the lab work necessarily, but rather it was the data analysis and the writing of our reports. I came into the class thinking we'd mainly be focusing on the lab parts of class. Instead, a lot of the strenuous work was done for the data analysis and writing of the report in my opinion. However, this taught me the importance of communicating our findings and how to get straight to point as we did in our 3 minute mini presentation.

Another thing that was irritating was the inconclusive data that I got. From our SDS PAGE results, my partner and I saw no bands in our purified protein lane. It was hard to write about our protein purification, when we were not even sure that our protein was purified in the first place. Our assay results were also contrasting one another. The PPIase activity was contrary to what we expected in the sense that ligand binding would decrease specific activity, but that did not occur in our data. The DSF assay, however, aligned to what we thought would occur in the sense that the melting temperature of our protein would be higher when bound to ligands than by itself. The problem was how to write a meaningful analysis given to contrasting data, while conveying the importance of our project.

The main lesson I will take away from this module is knowing how to communicate our findings and display its importance regardless of the outcome of our project. No matter what, all data is not useless and we can use it to tell a story (and hopefully fit it all into a 3 minute presentation). Let's hope the skills we learned in Mod 1 will make it easier for us in Mod 2.

-Masrur Alam

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