ANAT2341 Lab 12

Stem Cell Paper Presentation

As part of the assessment for this course, your group will give a 15 minutes journal club presentation (including 3 minutes question time) in the final lab 12 on 23 October.

This assignment will allow you to apply the knowledge that your acquired in the stem cell lecture, and it will teach you to search journal databases, to become familiar with the research field of stem cell biology, and to improve your presentation skills.

You will discuss a recent (published after 2013) original research article (not a review!) on stem cell biology or technology.

Please send the PDFs of 2-3 articles to Annemiek (A.Beverdam@unsw.edu.au) by 5 pm on Tuesday 16 October. She will judge suitability and select the best article for the journal club.

Please note that the best articles are found in journals with the highest impact factors: Nature, Science, Cell, Cell Stem Cell, Stem Cell Reports, etc). Please contact Annemiek in case you are at a loss, and she will help you find one.

During the presentation, it works best if one student discusses the introduction, the second the results section, and the third the discussion section. Please note that one slide takes about 1 minute to talk through. So do not use more than 15 to 20 slides total. Please read through the tips below on how to prepare a good presentation.

Each other group will ask at least one question following a journal club presentation.

Your group will receive the same mark, which will contribute to your individual assessment. This mark will be based on:

- insight and comprehension,

- presentation and slide style,

- engagement in question time and discussion,

- keeping within time.

All students of the group are required to contribute to developing and/or presenting the group presentation. If a student fails to to so, this will result in a penalty of the final mark. Please contact Annemiek per email if you feel that a group member did not contribute. She will deal with this confidentially.

Good luck and have fun!

Presentation Hints for Student

1. Keep your presentation short and concise. Not every detail of the article needs to be discussed in the presentation, but limit it to the bare minimum that is required to get the main message of the article across. For instance, do not go into too much detail in method sections. Not all nitty-gritty detail of the results needs to be discussed. The less info your audience has to take in, the higher the chance that they will understand your story.

2. Split the presentation up in three parts: introduction, Results and Discussion. Do not talk through the Material and Methods Sections separately!

- Introduction equips the audience with the information required to understand the the research, and supports the research hypothesis and research questions addressed in the article. - The results sections consists of multiple sections. Talk through each of these sections in the following sequence: 1. research question asked, 2. assays and methods used to address this question, 3. experimental outcomes, 4. conclusions. - The discussion summarizes and interprets the outcomes, discusses the shortfalls, places the results in the larger context of the research fields, discusses the implications of the data for human disease, and issues raised by the findings and future experiments that will may resolve these questions.

3. Use mostly figures and very limited text on your slides. Make sure that you know and understand what you want to get across. Do not use cheat sheets and do not learn your presentation literally by heart. Explain carefully. Use your slides as cheat sheets. Make eye contact with your audience and get a feel for whether they understand your story.

4. Talk your audience carefully through each of the slides and engage with the slides and with your audience to gauge their understanding. Slides are an indispensable part of the presentation. Each item on your slides should be relevant and addressed and highlighted with pointer, fingers, stick. Slide shows are indispensable for a presentation, as is the presenter. They should support and enhance a presentation, they should aid your audience in understanding.

5. Talk your audience through each of the figures on your slides. Figures may be obvious to you, but not to your audience unless you explain them carefully. So explain what experiment has been carried out, and what is displayed in the figure:

       on the X and Y-axes
       what the bars represent in diagrams
       the tissues/cell types displayed
       the bands on Western blot, RNA and DNA gels,
       What colors represent colors in immunostainings, etc etc.

6. Please note that you only need to highlight this experimental detail that is necessary to get the main message of the figure across.

7. Annotate the figures in your presentation carefully but sparingly. Label panels, axes, images etc so that figures are self-explicatory.

8. To stay in control the presenter should flick through the slide show. Not another member of the team.

9. If you didn’t understand the articles in depth, read a recent review or even go back to text books to acquire the basic knowledge. Also, if you discuss results of a crucial experiment but do not understand the technology. Please go back to the original references or your text books to read up on this technology. You should be on top of everything you say or write up in your slides.

10. Stick to your time. Don’t make too many slides. Each slide should take about a minute on average to talk through. Try to avoid acronyms and abbreviation.