Covered All Three Topics. Slides Simple and Clear. Fine Job on Role As Transcription Factor

John MichalakHoxA997.5

Covered all three topics. Slides simple and clear. Fine job on role as transcription factor, and generalized role in A/P patterning. Good job on knockout. OK job on conditional KO but did not explicitly say that this was conditional and not whole animal. Good job on leukemia and AML. Did not have picture of fusion protein or know which partner contributed the promotor. A little weak on nature and function of Meis co-factor—this also came out in questions. Did a good job on presenting some primary data at end. Knowledge base good but not perfect. Overall a very good job.

Doug Meardon XPF90

Basically covered all three topics with caveat below. Slides generally simple and clear, though slide intro to XP was a bit wordy and long. Good job on XP, very good job on UV damage and nucl. Excision repair. A little weak on some efforts to include primary data—e.g., CHO mutant cell data, cloning of gene process. Good job on the disease again at the end. One significant weakness—said “I couldn’t find an XPF KO so I will talk about knockout of its partner ERCC1.”—however, there is an XPF knockout, I found it in a single search of medline, done in 2004, and it did not have the same phenotype. Also, overall talk a bit long (14 minutes).

Samantha Lee TSC282.5

Covered all three topics. Reasonable job on disease. Description of biochemical role and pathway not very strong. Showed three different complex pathway slides, talked about them without pointing to relevant parts, though most of what she said was correct. I think this left the class confused. Slides were often overly complex—e.g., put fly, rat and yeast phenotypes on same slide. Quite a few mis-statements of fact: e.g., since there are many different mutations found in tumors “scientists don’t think it acts like a classical tumor suppressor”, “basically everything is an inhibitor of the TSC1/TSC2 complex” while talking about complex pathway slide, fly mutations affect cell size and pigmentation…”, “doesn’t follow usual pattern of tumor suppressors since most cases are somatic”. Weak on questions—e.g., when asked “what is the phenotype of a heterozygote” she said “the same as the phenotype of a homozygote” apparently not understanding that patients are heterozygotes. Weak knowledge base.

Joe PietropaoliArchipelago95

Covered all three topics-. Nice clear slides. Started very strong but went downhill a bit at end. Very good review of ubiquitin pathway. Nice description of protein domains and functions. Good job on SCF complex. Strong knowledge base. Good job on discovery in yeast and fly phenotype. Mouse KO description a little confusing. Good job on heterozygous mice. A bit weak on endometrial cancer—didn’t even tell us what part of the body that was, slides got wordy, last slide on “mutations in cdc4” was complex and not well explained. Good job on questions.