As a biomedical science major, I have taken many different biology courses throughout my undergraduate career, the most important being General Biology 105/106. It might be the easiest biology class I have taken, but it was the first one where I began to explore my future field and all it entailed in a very broad sense (it wouldn’t be until I took Microbiology that I fell in love with the field). One of the main components to the course was to create an extensive lab report on the process of photosynthesis that spanned across almost the entire semester. I had created lab reports before, but this was the first one at a college level that would set a pretense to what my future lab reports would also look like, including a report I would create at another university.
The first part of writing a lab report is writing an introduction to give a background on the information one is studying. In General Biology, I learned how to access and evaluate different sources and to synthesize the information together to give readers background information about the topic studied. I learned about the library database as a source for information and learned how to properly cite a source manually. Our teacher also taught us the importance of finding information from sources only with “.org, .edu, or .gov” sites to avoid inaccurate information, with emphasis on being able to identify an author, date and if the article was peer reviewed. I have found that researching for a science class can be easier than others because there are many different research articles one can pull information from. Not only did I learn how to do this in general biology, but I expanded on it in other classes. In Immunology I learned the importance of what order the authors are in, such that the most important contributor to the experiment is the last author stated. I also learned about different databases to search for more inclusive information about different antibodies and how to use them in experiments.
After learning how to find credible sources, I had to work on strategies to synthesize information and form my own hypothesis. When I first started writing, I had a bad habit of using too many quotes and not stating what I already knew from class because I worried a teacher wouldn’t believe me and say I was plagiarizing, as one can see from my first introductory paper for the course. I would find articles that stated exactly what I wanted to stay and cite them and just throw information together. Now, to begin my research I start by lots of searching across the library database, and when I find a source that I like, I copy the URL into word document to save for later, with main points that I liked from the article. Then, when I have felt I have gathered enough information, I start to formulate what information I need, and fact check my sources against each other. This involves creating multiple rough drafts to an introduction and continuing to shorten and synthesize information down to key sentences that pull from my own knowledge and what I have learned. When I start the project early enough, I also ask a professor to look over my work and see what they think.
The final part to creating an introduction is to state the hypothesis or what is being tested. For example, looking in mice muscle cells for the presence of actin using indirect antibody detection with a fluorescent microscope. This is what the introduction revolves around and following the introduction is the material/procedure of what was done to test the hypothesis. When I first started in the class, I used “if, then” statements to relate what I was studying, clearly identifying the dependent and independent variables. Then I wrote statements such as “when we do this… this will be observed.”. Any writing style can work, but simply stating what I think will happen with confidence is my answer is the best choice. The hypothesis should revolve around past knowledge and new research on the subject have a way to test the opposite of it, the null hypothesis. I have practiced writing novel hypothesis throughout all my science classes and have included a few reports below to showcase this.
The results depicted in my paper on photosynthesis correctly exhibited what should be observed based on millions of other experiments done by scientists throughout history as reflected in my hypothesis. To showcase my results, I learned how to format figures and tables correctly as well. The purpose behind doing this report was to help students understand the process of writing an extensive lab report that one day could be published in a research article journal, such as Nature. However, one of the biggest problems students need to overcome is to publish their actual results, even if it isn’t the correct answer. This is important because when studying something that isn’t as definitively proven, different results might lead to the ability to form a better hypothesis from the results or lead to nixing the whole idea all together.
Finishing long lab reports is just as exciting as finishing a paper. Often, the lab is over the course of a few weeks and being able to reveal the final results is often a mixed bag depending on the outcome. Good or bad, practicing new lab techniques that I may use in my future career is important, but even more so is to record and publish my findings correctly. I hope that one day I can create a research paper up to the standards of being peer reviewed and published in a journal for dentistry.