LS 510 (section 001) Fall 2006

Plant Biology Journal Club

Paper Selection:

Any paper related to plant stress responses is suitable for the journal club this semester. This is a very broad field covering both abiotic (temperature, light, salt, drought, ...) and biotic (herbivores, pathogens, ...) stresses. It is suggested that you pick a paper that's not too closely related to your own work.

Within these constraints you can select any research paper from any journal (as long as some standard of quality is maintained) that is of interest to you and (hopefully) to other people. A partial list of journals that can provide such articles is given below. Some of the criteria to look out for are

• Is this paper addressing an interesting biological problem?
  • Papers that fill in the little details that everyone had been suspecting for many years are usually not very exciting.
• Do we learn something new about how plants are functioning?
  • Sometimes it is interesting to describe a new phenomenon, but usually we want to get some mechanistic insight into how things are working.
• Is the paper understandable to the general scientist?
  • There are excellent papers out there that only experts in the field can understand since the authors never bothered to explain things properly.
• Are the experimental methods explained sufficiently?
  • We want to understand not only what the authors are concluding, but also how they arrived at their conclusions.
• Does this paper represent the current "state of the art"?
  • It doesn't make much sense to dicuss a paper when many of the questions left open by it have been answered in the meantime.

If you have any questions about the paper selection process, want a paper approved, or need help in preparing for the presentation, you can contact the instructors.

Paper Presentation

The paper presentation has to include an introduction into the biological question that the authors are trying to address.

If the authors are using "unusual" experimental approaches to reach their conclusions, you have to include an outline for how this experiment is done and what can be concluded (or not concluded) from it. The question of what constitutes an "unusual" experiment is difficult to answer, but you definitely have to be prepared to explain all experiments described in the paper.

For long papers, it may be helpful to limit your presentation to the most important figures (and keep the others as backup in your file) so we have more time for discussions.

The total time of the presentation (without questions) should be no more than 30 minutes.

It is easiest to download the figures from the journal web site and import them into Powerpoint (or Keynote...). Please note that there are often different versions of the figures available. Make sure you get one that has sufficient resolution for a presentation on the big screen. (PDF files often turn out too grainy.)

Suggested Journals:

Plant-specific Journals:

Plant Cell
Plant Journal
Plant Physiology
Planta
Plant & Cell Physiology
Physiologia Plantarum
Plant Physiology and Biochemistry
Journal of Plant Physiology
Journal of Experimental Botany
Plant Molecular Biology

General (and other) Journals:

Nature
Science
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Current Biology
EMBO Journal

Cell
Journal of Cell Biology
Development
Genes and Development
Journal of Biochemistry

A good starting point to look for "interesting topics" can be found in review journals such as these:

Trends in Plant Science
Current Opinion in Plant Biology

If any of these links do not get you to downloadable articles, you may have to go through the library web site and link to the journal from there.

page last updated on 06.09.05.