Aims

• To give the opportunity for individual reading and study in structural bioinformatics.
• To give experience in writing a popular science description of a research project.

Objectives

After this assignment you will:

• have a more thorough understanding of a topic within the field of structural bioinformatics;
• be able to describe a research project in a way that appeals to a general reader.

Exercise

Select one of the papers by Prof David Jones:

• Lise S, Walker-Taylor A, Jones DT. Docking protein domains in contact space. BMC Bioinformatics. 2006 Jun 21;7:310 (PubMed)
• McGuffin LJ, Smith RT, Bryson K, Sorensen SA, Jones DT. High throughput profile-profile based fold recognition for the entire human proteome. BMC Bioinformatics. 2006 Jun 7;7:288 (PubMed)
• Jones DT, Bryson K, Coleman A, McGuffin LJ, Sadowski MI, Sodhi JS, Ward JJ. Prediction of novel and analogous folds using fragment assembly and fold recognition. Proteins. 2005;61 Suppl 7:143-51 (PubMed)

Suppose that it is two years before that paper was written, and that you are writing a grant application for funding for the work described in that paper. As part of your application, you must write a popular science description of the proposed work (maximum 4500 characters).

This should be written in such a way that even someone with little knowledge of the subject can understand what the project is about, and what benefits the proposed research could bring. Think about the reviewers reading your proposal. After reading the description they should understand the importance of the area of the proposed research, they should feel excited about the research that you are proposing, and they should be convinced that the project is worth funding!

Since you are pretending to write this in advance of the work being done, you cannot refer to results obtained, and you do not need to describe all details of the methods to be used.

You are welcome to choose a different paper by David Jones for this assignment. In that case, please inform me of your choice in advance.

Please send your description to me as plain text in an e-mail message (no Word files, no PDF files, etc.). The maximum number of characters is a hard limit (as in Vetenskapsrådet applications). There is no minimum length constraint.

Students from the Chalmers Graduate School in Bioscience should complete the assignment after meeting David Jones in February 2007.