The Plant Physiology Term Report Project
By now you realize that we have worked with the reactions catalyzed by potato tuber
polyphenoloxidase for two weeks in a row, gathering data and then analyzing them and
making publishable-quality graphs. This project will continue, culminating in a termreport. This report will cover the entire project. It should have the structure of a laboratory
report as you have been taught to do it in the core courses. The guidelines in the
departmental style manual (Pechenik, 2013 or Knisely, 2013) should help you with this
writing assignment as well. The journal, Plant Physiology, is our target journal, so the style
observed in that journal is what you should use as your model. This journal has its content
available for free on-line (http://www.plantphysiol.org/)! It is refreshing in today’s dollardriven world; I am proud of my professional organization’s choice to do this. A look at a
recent article should give you a decent example. Obviously the reader of your term report
is another competent plant physiologist; this impacts what and how you write. Your paper
needs to have the following major sections.
Title
You need a title, and it should be modeled after this:
The effect of independent variable on the dependent variable in Taxon binomial.
Obviously you have to plug in the actual variables from your project and the correct Latin
binomial. It is in a larger font, centered at the top of a page.
Authors
Your name goes first as primary author. Your lab partners are listed alphabetically, by last
name, after yours. Your contact information appears on a new line; this usually includes a
university mailing address and perhaps an email address. These lines are centered, in a
normal size font, below the title.
Abstract
This you already know about. It is a mini lab report in one paragraph. There is an
introductory sentence, a sentence or two about materials and methods, but the bulk of the
paragraph (the rest of the sentences) is about the results and what they tell you (discussion
points).
Introduction
Obviously here you are orienting your reader to the subject of your project. You do need to
go back a bit to some basics (but this IS a plant scientist reading it, OK?). So something very
tight about what enzymes are and what they do. You escalate into a paragraph about
enzyme kinetics, since this project is based on the theory of Michaelis-Menten kinetics. You
need to make sure your reader is fully prepared to understand how one can tell whether a
substrate analog might be another enzyme substrate, a competitive or non-competitive
inhibitor, innocuous, or a substrate for the polymerization reactions. You also want to
introduce your reader to what is known about polyphenoloxidase already (Klabunde et al.,
1998). Obviously these paragraphs (pages) are going to have references to professional
literature that need to follow the usual (author, date) format, with full entries in Literature
Cited (see below). Remember that we do not quote the literature; in biology we paraphrase
what we have read (in our own words!) and then cite the source as shown above. This
introduction ends with a paragraph introducing what your study is testing and how it is
designed to add knowledge about polyphenoloxidase. How many references are needed? I
require a bare minimum of two pertinent professional references. More is better,
obviously, but they all need to be pertinent; there are trash articles that pop up on
searches with polyphenoloxidase or polyphenol oxidase. Remember if you use the ECSU
library databases you can actually get PDF files of many interesting papers from home!
Materials and Methods
This needs to outline, in a compact way, enough of your project procedures to allow a
scientist to reasonably replicate your work. But remember, the reader is a competent
scientist. You do not have to tell how to label things, how to pipet solutions. You can
assume the scientist knows how to make a 1:1 dilution series of a given stock solution,
without you giving details or concentration values. But if you used certain equipment that
strongly impacted your work or has unique features critical to your project, that equipment
needs to be specified. The Vernier SpectroVis Plus sensor and Vernier LabQuest instrument
are examples of this. Absorbance values are observed or measured and recorded; they
cannot be “read” until after you write them down! Remember that the project is about
reactions, so try not to focus too much attention on cuvettes. Since your project is over at
the time you start writing, this section is 100% past tense! Please do not use imperative
mood (i.e. do not give instructions).
As a reminder, it is easy to overlook data analysis techniques that you do after you
leave the laboratory, but they are just as important as what you do in the laboratory. By the
way, “lab” is an abbreviation of laboratory, which is to say a room in a building; it is NOT
the project or the experiment you are conducting in that laboratory!
It is best if this section is divided under subheadings (that act like subroutines in a
computer program) so you can avoid writing the same things over and over (or repeatedly
copying/pasting boiler plate text all over the place). Getting this part as compact as
possible without losing that ability to be replicated is tricky. Help each other with this.
Results
This is obviously where you strut your stuff on the findings you obtained. Clearly this
section has tables and graphs with captions; this makes them Tables and Figures. Captions
go above tables and below graphs. Captions have a title (not unlike the paper title in
format, though focused on the current graph or table). They have to tell how the data points
were obtained (brief materials and methods). They have to tell how you made sense of the
points (determined a smooth line to go through the points and how well that curve fits the
points). Tables and Figures are numbered in separate sequence series.
There must be a supporting text, before, between, and/or after the Tables and
Figures. In this text you tell the story of your project’s findings. This will obviously direct
the reader to the figures with callouts (Fig. 1). The paragraphs might compare results in
one (Table 1) to another (Fig. 2) of your graphic elements. It might also communicate other
findings not found in the Tables and Figures. Remember the white potato homogenate
turning pink in the blender? That might be something to tell about here too. Unless the
professor is doing magic, he is irrelevant to your project. You might want to talk about a
separate spectrum analysis and a corresponding choice of an alternate wavelength for the
spectrophotometric data collection. You might want to give the results of alternative
Michaelis-Menten values (Km, Vmax, and r2) not shown in the graphics but that are
important to the interpretations you will make later. In other words, you might have a
Solver solution for data shown in one figure (Fig. 2), but in the text, tell about the fit (r2) of
the catechol control values (Fig. 1) to the data for that analog (Fig. 2). Remember, you do
not make interpretations of the data in this section; you merely guide the reader to
understand what the findings/data were. Yes, the project is over, so this is all in past tense!
Discussion
This section marries the literature-based knowledge about the subject (previously
presented in the introduction) with what you have found (previously presented in the
results). This section obviously will both call out your figures (Fig. 4, Table 1) and to the
literature (Pechenik, 2013 or Knisely, 2013) that you have read and understood. Clearly
you will end up making some conclusions about your three catechol-analogs; but please do
not put them in a “Conclusions” section. These are your contributions to the knowledge
base, but they join with and integrate into what is already known. They may complement;
they may contrast. You should also discuss the reasons for your interpretations based on
your findings and the theory of Michaelis-Menten kinetics. And a paper of this sort would
be severely lacking if you did not discuss the structure of the analogs you used compared to
each other and to catechol, and how the differences in structure explain the way they
interact with polyphenoloxidase, and what they tell you about the active site of the enzyme.
This discussion can cover size, functional groups, polarity, charge, proximity, etc. Obviously
this is going to rely on your extensive experience and expertise with Organic Chemistry
(CHE 216/217). But your project is done and the literature is older, so this section is all in
past tense.
Literature Cited
Here you list complete citations for the literature you referred to in the entire paper. There
could be references made in the introduction, materials and methods, results, and
discussion (some people even put one in an abstract, though it is frowned upon!); so check
your manuscript over to be sure you have them all listed here. The listing is alphabetical by
the last name of the first author. Be careful typing people’s names, especially in foreign
languages. It is not respectful to misspell names! That applies equally well to Latin
binomials. Follow the format in the style manual or (better yet!) the target journal (Plant
Physiology). Be meticulous with the formatting and typing. Leaving or mistyping elements
can make it impossible for a reader to find the material you are communicating about! That
reflects very badly on you. How many articles must be here? The best answer is “as many
as you find are pertinent enough to use!” But the bare minimum for this assignment is two
professional articles. Additional references are fairly open, but professional articles beat
textbooks beat professional webpages beat amateur websites beat Facebook. It is flattering
when you cite my lectures, slides, handouts, or website pages but, frankly, there are far
more authoritative sources that you should be using instead!
Proofread!
You are in an advanced course. You have had four writing intensive core courses. The
expectations for you are high. Please show that you are as good as I think you are. Help
each other with this…but watch out about plagiarism! I am a very old professor, so I have
seen a lot of it and can detect it really easily. In those core courses we do a few “slaps on the
wrist” while we teach you about plagiarism; at this level, plagiarism is guaranteed to go
directly to judicial affairs without passing Go or collecting a grade on this assignment! Take
this seriously. They fired the president of Central CSU for plagiarizing an idea in a letter to
the editor in a local newspaper! In your proofreading, please remember you are NEVER to
use Isomer A, Isomer B, or Isomer C anywhere in any part of this paper! Use their names!
Double space your report before you print it out!
Assemble the printed pages, face up, top up, in the section order given above.
It may be helpful to the grading process if you include your data sheet as an appendix with
your paper.
Staple the package together in the upper left corner, and keep the staple near the corner so
that the pages can be opened and read. It is amazing how many people just stab a staple in
the middle of the page somewhere, I guess not thinking that someone might actually read
it.
Hand your paper in on time or early. Late papers are penalized. The doors to the faculty
wing of the Science building click locked when the system clock says 5 PM. Oops! Your
coach has turned into a pumpkin! Sorry! Better to be early than late.
Note: If you go to the writing center for help with your paper, please be sure to bring this
assignment page with you.
Literature Cited
Based on the model of Plant Physiology
http://www.plantphysiol.org/site/misc/ifora.xhtml
Kablunde T, Eicken C, Sacchettini JC, Krebs B (1998) Crystal structure of a plant catechol
oxidase containing a dicopper center. Nat Struct Biol 5: 1084-1090
Knisely, K (2013) A short guide to writing about biology, Ed 4. Sinauer/Macmillan,
Sunderland, MA, USA
Pechenik JA (2013) A short guide to writing about biology, Ed 8. Longman/Pearson
Education Inc, Old Tappan, NJ, USA