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Lab reports are formal typed papers that describe your experiments
and interpretations. They will be written according to the format
of a journal research article:
| Abstract: |
A brief statement of the problem
and the results. No more than a short paragraph. |
| Introduction: |
An explanation of the problem and your plan
for solving it. Do not give experimental protocols and results
here. Just what you want to find out, and your basic approach
to the problem. Introductions are relatively short. You do not
have to spill your guts about your vast knowledge of recombinant
DNA here. That will be best done on the exam. |
| Methods and Materials: |
Present a description of the protocols, strains,
DNA's etc. The Methods and Materials is like a cook-book that
allows others to see exactly what your experimental conditions
were. Do not give experimental design. For example, if you are
talking about restriction digests, give the conditions under
which you do a digest, but don't state what DNA's and what enzymes
were used: that is experimental design, and it belongs in the
Results section. |
| Results: |
You should give a written explanation of the
experiments, minus the protocols (given in Methods and Materials),
with a careful description of figures and tables. Each figure
and table must be numbered and captioned. You should only give
enough of your conclusion s to enable the reader to proceed logically
from one experiment to the next. |
| Discussion: |
Here you restate the problem and experiments, and provide
a detailed discussion of your conclusions and recount how you
arrived at them. |
A Word About Plagiarism
Most scientific research is carried out through teamwork and
the final result is a single report co-authored by all members
of the team. Plagiarism, therefore is not an issue. In class,
however, although the work is done in pairs and usually partners
work together on the preparation and analysis of the data, each
student must prepare his/her own lab report. It is acceptable
to format the tables and figures jointly, but the main text must
be written individually.
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