For this assignment you will be working together with your team members, design a webposter presenting your hypothesis, data, and conclustions for the yeast microarray experiment. The sections (or pages) of the electronic poster should be organized in a traditional lab report format for presentation of scientific research:  Title and Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion/Conclusions. The advantage of presenting this information on the web is that it will be easier to share our results with others like Dr. Slekar. The following is a list of the new pages that need to be created and some minimum requirements of what should be on each of them. We will be going over more details of how to create this page during class. If this is your first experience creating a web page then I recommend keeping your poster other than the title page very simple.

Title Page:

This is the home page for the e-poster. You may use as many fancy pictures as you would like on this page but make sure they are cited and you have asked permission to use them or that the picutres are your own. Remember to keep the rest of the poster simpler and focused on the content. Please call this page index.htm so that I can create a link to it. Please place this page and all of your data in your folder.

The title page should include:

• The title of the poster.
• An Abstract of your poster to help Dr. Slekar or a new group coming into the class quickly find things that may be helpful to them (please write slide numbers for your microarrays and the color you lableled your mutant RNA on this page)
• Links to each of the sections of the poster
• All of the authors Names and e-mails.

Introduction Page:

This page is to include an introduction to the project. You should include an introduction to microarrays and the background information about the yeast mutatation used. You should also have a statement about the goal(s) of your microarray experiment. You should spend some time with the literature and again cite at least two relevant sources of information that you consulted. A rough draft of this section will be due in class. See schedule.

Methods Page(s):

Outline all of the steps used in generating the data which are presented in the Results section. For all of the available protocols you can link to the protocols at the molecular web site (rather than write them all out again) but you also need to put in a sentence or two to help the reader follow what happened in each procedure. Remember though to list deviations from the protocol that you made or choices that were made when we could make these . Please remember to put into your report your slide number(s) you used whether they worked or not and whether they were yours or not and the colors you used to label the control cDNAs. If you do not have this in the methods. You will be docked half of the points of the report !!!

Any revised protocols you worked out using one of the programs or hints to future classes to especially regarding statistics and data analysis. Students working on statistics who do more than required are able to earn up to 5 extra credit points for this project - statistics should be discussed in methods, results and discussion section if done as needed to earn these points.

 Results Page:

This is the heart and soul of the poster.  What were your results?  Your data should be clearly presented and should tell the story of how you reached your conclusions.  Besides presenting your results in Figures and/or Tables, also describe your results in the text. Refer to all Figure and Tables in order in the text. Figures should be clearly labeled so that someone can fully evaluate the data without you having to explain it to them as they look at it.

At a minimum, you should include:

• The O.D. Reading on your Yeast Cultures
• A copy of your RNA gel. Mark where the 28S and 18S are minimumally. Mark other bands if you can.
• The concentration and purities of your RNA samples.
• A picture of a portion of your microarray data from the .TIFF file that you gridded
• A graph presenting your green and red pixal data before and after statisticall normalization
• At table of upregulated and downregulated genes indicating what ratios are in all slides examined and gene function
• Other information as needed (remember that each group should try to examine the data in several unique ways)

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Discussion/ Conclusion Page:

Here are some general questions that should be discussed by everyone.

• Discuss the reason for doing your particular experiment - restate the goal of the experiment
• Discuss the purity and quality of your RNA.
• Discuss your any problems in the procedures.
• How could this experiment be improved next time?
• What would you do to continue this experiment?
• Discuss the results you generated - did you see anything of interest or was your data all bogus -- explain
• Discuss the genes that were found- are any of them things that Kim should look at further? Do they make sense with the experiment?
• Other information as required.

Here is the break down of points and some information about grading the webposters.

• 10 pts. handing in evaluations of three other posters
• 10 pts will be assigned by your peers to assess individual roles of all team members
• 50 pts of your grade will come from the instructor evaluation of the new poster.
• 50 pts of your grade will come from a peer evlauation of your new poster.

Please Grade the Following Posters--

Evaluation criteria

1.You will be asked to rate each new poster on a scale of 1-10. 

To guide you in your evaluation, here are some things to think about.

Title Page:
Does it communicate accurately the subject of the poster?
Are all the elements there and do the links take you where they should?

Introduction:
Does it introduce the project well?  Does it give enough background to understand the goals of the project?  Does it communicate the goals of the project at all?  Is it well-written and free of grammatical and spelling errors?

Methods:
Can you easily follow what the authors did during this project?  Is there enough detail to let you follow what they did without bogging down in unnecessary details?

Results:
Are the results clearly presented?  Are the figures well-done and clearly-labelled?  Are the authors making claims that their data does not support?

Discussion/Conclusion:
Are the results interpreted well?  Are ambiguous results discussed?  Did the group teach you something new about the data and how to analyze it? Are the conclusions valid?

Presentation:
Is the "poster"  easy to navigate through?  Is the text readable on the computer screen?   Are the web pages neat and attractive? If you asked questions, were they answered clearly?