My group and I covered a paper titled ‘Biochemical Foundations of Health and Energy Conservation in Hibernating Free-ranging Subadult Brown Bear Ursus arctos’.
In this paper the researchers attempt to discover the underlying molecular techniques used in brown bear physiology to conserve energy and muscle mass, as well to fight off diseases, infections and other health risks associated with extended inactivity and lack of sustenance.
My role was to give an overview of the study so that the audience understood the purpose of the research, as well as how the results were obtained. I covered the introduction, methods, and data sections of the paper.
The research we covered links into module 4, infection and immunity, as one of the main focuses of the paper was exploring how the bear fights infection during hibernation with what had originally seemed a weakened immune system – although the paper reveals that this is not the case.
Communication
While I spoke well and gave the audience a solid understanding of the papers goals and how they were reached – as was evident in my positive feedback and mark, which was quite high – I believe that my depth of understanding within the topic was lacking. I was aware of this prior to beginning the project and as such decided with my group to take an easier section that focused on discussing the methods and data presented in the paper rather than going into detail on the molecular and chemical explanations.
While this may have been a good decision to allow group members with a better grasp of the subject to talk more about content within their respective comfort zones, I believe I would have benefited from having to do more research and study to understand the mechanisms involved with hibernation.
Ways to increase my understanding, and therefore expand the content I could have discussed, include reviewing the lecture content relevant to metabolism, immunity and defense. If this didn’t provide sufficient understanding, background reading of papers like ‘Relationship between glutamine, branched-chain amino acids, and protein metabolism‘ and ‘Discrimination and dialogue in the immune system‘ would have supported my learning and given me a sound basis of knowledge prior to beginning work on the assessment.
Group Work
Working in groups of four proved to be a mostly beneficial aspect of this assessment task, as it allowed us to break the final objective down into smaller, more manageable goals, and gave us a greater bank of knowledge and experience to rely on when brainstorming the best way to tackle the speech – resulting in a “creative” way of presenting our talk according to our group feedback.
Although the group was for the most part positive, it also lead to some difficulties organising and committing to meeting times. Some ways we attempted to mitigate these issues was through the use of a group agreement. While this worked most of the time, unpredictable circumstances and lack of general repercussions or personal accountability resulted in the group agreement being disregarded on a number of occasions.
The main communication we had was via the use of Facebook to organise meetings, and Google Docs/Slides to keep track of each others progress. Google Docs/Slides proved to be invaluable and was mostly effective in keeping everybody on the same page with style and format.
Facebook lead to some issues with group members not checking the messages and missing important updates, however we dealt with this by putting all information on Google Docs as well.
What Have I Learnt?
This assessment has taught me the importance of open and honest communication. I believe I failed to speak honestly with my group when I was struggling which then resulted in the whole team suffering lost marks. Alice Boyles Ph.D suggests ways to ask for help and to solve issues with confidence when working with a team in her piece for Psychology Today such as ensuring you’ve attempted to work it out before asking for help, having specific requests ready when you’ve run out of options to help yourself, and asking multiple group members for help for the best chance of solving the issue. It would be beneficial in the future to ensure that when my knowledge and confidence in a subject is lacking that I try these tactics with my group to get the best results, including knowledge and marks, for myself and the others I’m working with.
However these techniques will only work if I organise and attend regular meetings and study sessions with my group, allowing for a forum to work on understanding the content and developing a strategy to complete the assignment to a standard we are all happy with. One way to ensure effective management of group time and individual study is by using a pre-planned schedule such as the one recommended by atlassian. They suggest having a set amount of meetings to begin with, with specific topics to discuss and goals to meet. More meetings can be scheduled if needed, but ensuring you allow enough time in the original meetings and begin them on time, these meetings should suffice. By using this meeting plan I am encouraged to make time for meetings in advance and help me commit to meetings I’ve agreed to, which has been an issue for me in the past.
Links
Our paper
Welinder, K., Hansen, R., Overgaard, M., Brohus, M., Sønderkær, M., von Bergen, M., Rolle-Kampczyk, U., Otto, W., Lindahl, T., Arinell, K., Evans, A., Swenson, J., Revsbech, I. and Frøbert, O. (2016). Biochemical Foundations of Health and Energy Conservation in Hibernating Free-ranging Subadult Brown BearUrsus arctos. Journal of Biological Chemistry, [online] 291(43), pp.22509-22523. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5077189/.
Background reading on Metabolism
Holeček, M. (2002). Relation between glutamine, branched-chain amino acids, and protein metabolism. Nutrition, [online] 18(2), pp.130-133. Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899900701007675.
Background reading on Immunity
Cohen, I. (2000). Discrimination and dialogue in the immune system. Seminars in Immunology, [online] 12(3), pp.215-219. Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1044532300902343.
Asking for help
Boyles, A. (2019). 7 Effective Ways to Ask for Help (and Get It). [online] Psychology Today. Available at: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-practice/201610/7-effective-ways-ask-help-and-get-it.
When to schedule meetings and why
Work Life by Atlassian. (2019). Running effective meetings: a guide for humans – Work Life by Atlassian. [online] Available at: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/teamwork/how-to-run-effective-meetings.
Biol103 E-Portfolio 