Your paper is due April 29.


Overview:
The paper should be 5-7 pages, double spaced and typed. It should be a critical review of a specific, outstanding problem in microbial development, and should have as much of your own input as you can provide. You should focus on 2 to 3 papers for the main part of the paper, but at least 5-7 papers should be referenced (many of these will be used in the introduction and/or discussion part of your paper).

Grading will reflect the degree of critical evaluation of the material and the amount of independent thought woven into the paper.

You may choose your own topic, but if you do please check with me before you get started on the paper. Or, you may choose from the list of topics below. For each topic below, I give 2 to 3 papers that should get you started. You might use these papers as your main ones to be discussed/presented, or you might find others on this topic that are more interesting to you and/or more recent. If you choose one of the topics below, your paper does not have to be on the exact topic that I list--imy listing can simply serve as a starting place for you, and you might find a related topic that is more interesting to you.


Paper Format:
The paper should have an abstract or summary of no more than 3/4 of a page, single spaced. The rest of the paper should be double spaced, and should be no more than 7 pages in length, ignoring any figures you include.

There should be an introduction in which you provide the background information and the problem/question that your paper will address. There should be a final section in which you present specific findings/results from two or three papers that address the problem. You do not have to present every finding from each paper. The findings should also be discussed and critically evaluated in this section. Figures from the papers can be used to reinforce the findings and make it easier to talk/present them, and you may want to include figures of your own if they will be useful to the reader.

You might have but do not have to have a conclusion section where the main points are summarized. In this section or the previous one if you do not have a conclusion section, you need to indicate the outstanding/remaining questions and hopefully suggest experimental approaches to address those questions.

Finally, you need a reference list that cites any paper that you give information from in full---all authors, title of paper, journal, volume, page numbers, and year of publication. I suggest you use a format like that in Journal of Bacteriology (paper #6 that was presented in class was from this journal).

In short, your paper should be similar to what we do in class for a single paper, but instead for two or more papers (thus you need to be selective in the data you show/discuss and you need to present a CRITICAL assessment of the topic/problem).


Potential Topics: