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Molecular biology research/publication advice for a high school student?


mobionerd02

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I need some direction with research I want to do. For background, I am a junior in high school and part of a program from which I got two publications into the NCBI for isolating proteins from a plant called duckweed and doing some rudimentary bioinformatic analysis on it. I also had the chance to 3-D print the protein with its important domains/ligands highlighted. I want to take what I have (a DNA sequence and extensive knowledge of the structure) to make a claim and write a full fledged research paper. Without further lab experiments, I am not sure about what direction I can take what I have to write a proper research paper. Any tips/advice would be appreciated. Also I'm not sure if this is the best place to post this, so any forum recommendations which may be more helpful would be appreciated.!

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It is very unlikely that you got enough from a high school project to write a proper research paper. The first question that you should ask yourself is not "what did I do" but "what open question did I try to answer?". Also from your description it does not seem that you actually have a protein structure (x-ray crystallography is usually the gold standard for that), but rather just a prediction (I presume the bioinformatic part of it?). There is a huge gap between isolating a protein and having its 3D structure resolved, which you did not really address,

So the question there is again, what knowledge have you gained that is not already in current literature? Typically, this is at the start of a project, so perhaps you should read up on literature related to your project and think about the purpose of the project and how you want to use it to answer a research question. 

In that regard you will normally want to have guidance from the program advisors to put you on the right track. I will note that it is generally unlikely that a highschool project will have enough meat for a full publication.

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