So Many Figures



            When we first chose our journal articles a couple weeks ago I tried to be intentional about picking one that would make a good presentation. I wanted one that I found interesting, and one that would have enough engaging results to fill the full 10 minutes. It was those two criteria that led me to choose the “Directing Cellular Information Flow via CRISPR Signal Conductors”. I found the premise of engineering CRISPR constructs to act at ‘Boolean Logic Gates’ really intriguing, but what I didn’t realize until somewhat later was just how extensive this paper was. Not only did the authors design environment inducible CRISPR sgRNAs they also created three or four variations of this system, tested its responsiveness to a number of different conditions, created six different ‘logic’ gates, and used them to kill cancer cells. In addition to the 6 figures in the paper, there were 36 supplementary figures and 24 supplementary tables. Originally, I was worried about selecting a paper without enough to talk about, but I ended up with a paper that arguably had too much.

             The problem that I encountered when preparing my presentation became how to pare down these troves of data into a single 10-minute message. I decided early on that the most interesting piece was the activatable sgRNAs, and that the Boolean logic gates data was to elaborate for the 10 minutes I had allotted, especially if I wanted to walk through the entire experimental process. These decisions left me with a focus on the cancer killing experiments, but even with that small section of the paper it was a challenge trimming down to a single coherent message. Despite the numerous supplementary figures and confirmations that the researchers provided, I ended up selecting only a core set of experiments that supported the central message.

            In the end though, I’m actually pretty happy with the story I ended up telling. By being presented with so much information, it really forced me to think more deeply about what was important to my overall message, and to understand the connections between the data more deeply. Surprisingly, I found that I actually really enjoyed the process of going through this paper carefully, and transforming it into a presentation. If nothing else though, I think this was a great experience in reading and understanding an actual paper, even if I only ended up talking about 10% of it.

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