Difference between revisions of "20.109(S14):Primer design memo"

Revise for S14 to be more specific; follow some of the memo ideas from F09

Overview

Persuasive writing is often considered a specialized form of communication. Advertisements, letters to the editor, and brochures are all forms of persuasive writing. In scientific writing such as research articles, you are generally trying to indirectly persuade your audience of at least two things: that the research is interesting/valuable/applicable, and that the results mean what you think they do. Here you will try your hand at more explicit persuasive writing by crafting a short memo to your hypothetical supervisor at a company specializing in molecular diagnostics. You should prepare an update about the microsporidia research division that justifies the research you have recently pursued and also outlines your plans for the immediate future – should your supervisor continue funding the division, that is.

Logistics

Please submit your completed summary on Stellar, with filename FirstNameLastInitial _LabSection_Mod1.doc (for example, AgiS_TR_Mod1.doc).

This assignment is due by 11 am on March 18th (Tuesday) or March 19th (Wednesday), according to which day you have lab.

Content Guidelines

Your memo should be structured according to the following format.

whaddyacallit

Title, TO, FROM

Overview

Open your memo with about three sentences previewing the key conclusions that you will draw and support therein.

Motivation

Here you aim to motivate/justify two things in about 2-3 paragraphs:

• The overall strategy you have pursued
  • Did you seek to improve sensitivity, specificity, or both?
  • In what clinical context might your new diagnostic be used?
• The specific design choices that you made
  • What characteristics of the primers did you change?
  • What did you hypothesize would happen?

Include a summary table that compares your newly designed primers to your research division's previous effort (V1-PMP2). The text related to your specific design choices should explicitly refer to this table.

Outcomes

Use this section to point out the most important findings and analysis that led to your recommendation.

Begin by clearly describing, in both a figure(s) and text, the performance of your novel primer design. Explicitly compare this performance to your expectations. Whether or not you succeeded in designing primers superior to those with which you started, discuss the design factors that you believe had the greatest impact on primer performance.

Be sure to establish yourself as a credible source for this information. You will be most credible if you highlight your expertise and understanding of the subtleties of the subject based upon your experimental results. Establishing credibility also requires that you appreciate and directly address any limitations in the data.

Conclusion

Results

Here you should include the following:

• A short (1-2 paragraph) description of your findings.
• A figure depicting your raw PCR results (as seen on a gel).
• Optionally, a figure or table depicting the PCR results in some processed form.

The figure should include a complete caption as for a publication.

F09:

Format requirements

Memo Template

• Please model your memo on the following template
• Note: the recommended length for this memo is 1-2 pages, not including supplementary documentation

Body of Memo

After the header section (i.e. "to" "from" etc) the memo will have 3 major sections.

• Section 3: Recommended Action

This is your GO/NO GO decision. Your recommendation should stated clearly, in one sentence, and should based on considerations such as:

• What data you have so far
• How robust your data appears, i.e. performance of any controls as well as any relevant statistics
• What the weaknesses of your approach are
• Why this approach might be taken over others--this requires that you had previously identified competing technologies
• What further applications you envision for your assay