BIO306W:

Here are some suggestions for everyone:

1) The title should be specific and functional. It should have the name of the organism examined. It should include a listing a names of the important methods introduced (or at least put these in the objectives). The date should be included in the title or somewhere on the top of the page. Also, including the course number or name would help you identify what this is.

2) The purpose/objectives are almost always a repeating of the title which is expanded to two or three sentences.

The major purpose was to introduce several methods and these should be listed if you describe them in your Methods section: use of a dissecting microscope; compound, light microscope (Kohler illumination method); fluorescent microscope; microdissection; Vibratome sectioning; immunocytochemistry, histological techniques (dehydrating, clearing, mounting).

3) The background/intro describe new background knowledge that you learned. There is a good chance there will have one or more references that show the source of your new knowledge. For example, what is Vibratome sectioning (how is it different than other sectioning techniques)?

4) Define any abbreviations the first time they are used.

5) Look at the layout visually. Use bold, font size, carriage returns, etc. to help show the important breakpoints between the different parts of the report.

6) What about numbering pages and providing a Table of contents? Is the report long enough that it warrants page numbering? If the pages are numbered, you can refer from one part of the report in another.

7) If you feel that you’re not good at drawing, you could find a picture of a Vibratome or whatever you need on the web and label the parts you used and what they do. But don’t just paste in a picture; add labels and arrows or something so the picture is useful.

8) ALWAYS provide a figure number and meaningful title for each figure. Do the same for each table. For example: Figure 3: Drawing of a lateral portion of a Manduca larval head capsule at the beginning of metamorphosis showing the distribution of mitotic cells relative to the larval ocelli.

Sometimes you will want to include a figure legend below the figure that explains using full sentences the key features of what is shown. IN ADDITION, describe the figure in the body of the description of your results and refer to each figure sequentially as they come up in the the Results Section. For example, “We found that low levels of proliferation were present in the adult eye precursors prior to start of metamorphosis (Fig. 2). Just one day later, high levels of proliferation were detected (Fig. 3).”

P.S.: Something like the previous sentence might be a good one to also include in your Conclusions.

9) SOME Recipes:

PBS = phosphate-buffered saline

10 mM sodium phosphate pH 7.4

137 mM sodium chloride

Agarose = 7% low-melting point agarose in PBS

Fix = 3.7% formaldehyde in PBS at room temperature (RT)

What other solutions did we use and what were the recipes?

10) General issues that could be addressed in the Discussion Section of any lab report include:

A) Suggest explanations for why things happened the way they did. That includes suggestions for things that didn’t seem to work or that you had trouble with. Sometimes that includes variation within your own samples and in a classroom lab it could include describing and suggesting explanations for variation between your results/observations and those of other students. One thing that we would include here is the finding that the phalloidin-stained muscle cells glowed green so intensely that there was some bleed-through into the red channel making it difficult to see individual nuclei in regions of the embryo that had lots of muscle tissue.

B) Suggest improvements in the methods if the experiment were to be repeated. If you can’t think of any improvements, you can comment on what makes the methods that were used so effective.

C) Discuss how generalizable you think the results are. Would it be true for any part of the insect? Would it be true for all insects? Would it be true for all animals?

D) Discuss the limitations (strengths and weaknesses) of the experimental methods used. This may help in thinking about how the experiments could be improved when repeated. You can discuss the overall procedures and also specific, detailed steps. For example, in the first week we had trouble with the positioning of the razor blade relative to the sample. But later we found how to adjust the blade position. That can fit into your report in several different sections (Methods (“note: . . .”, Results, Discussion). For the Discussion, you might say, “As noted earlier in the Methods and Results Sections, we initially didn’t appreciate that the horizontal positioning of the blade path could be adjusted on the Vibratome. Having an adjustable blade allows for customizing the blade for a wide range of specimens. It is somewhat surprising we didn’t consider that when we had problems, but in sharing a single machine we didn’t really have the opportunity to get comfortable with each of its controls.” Something like that.

E) What happens next? Can you think of further experiments that would be interesting to do now? This is something scientists love to discuss.

F) a) Can you connect the background, methods, of your findings to something you learned in other classes?

b) Did you learn something either in the background information or actual experiment that you think is interesting? You can state that in the Discussion Section and then say why. This is especially nice if you can connect it to biology rather than just saying that you thought it was fun.

G) There are many more possibilities.

11) include citations to references as you use them in the report (best) or at least at the end of the report.

It will help you when you are thinking about one of the above numbers to include thinking about it in the context of another one of the numbers. For example, when you are thinking about #F, think if there is something you learned elsewhere that helps you discuss how generalizable the experiments are #C.