Friday, July 31, 2015

Archaea Online Journal Club

So many new articles, so little time. Let us help each other. Welcome to Archaea Online - a digital journal club about everything archaeal. We discuss new articles using the PeerWise platform.

The goal of the journal club is to gather grad students and researchers of all fields that study archaea - be it metabolism, cell biology, ecology, evolution or anything else. We will discuss a broad selection of articles to reflect the wide range of our field.

PeerWise is a system originally developed as an educational tool for classrooms that allows the users to help each other dissect the material by writing and answering questions. That way we build up a question bank together and can focus on the most relevant aspects of the article.

We will read one paper per month. What is next in your todo-pile?

To join , please subscribe to the google group and you will get a PeerWise ID within a few days. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/archaea-online

How it works:

You read the paper, you write questions, you answer questions and evaluate the quality of other people’s questions - that’s really all there is to it :-)

As any teacher know, there are no better way to learn something than to teach it, and by writing questions we have to put ourselves in that position. Not only will we decide what from the article is worth asking about, we also have to think of suitable answers and - because of the multiple choice format - possible ways of misunderstanding the material.

We refine the questions continuously during the month, so you can work through them whenever it suits you best. If you have a busy months and just want to skim through other people’s question that is fine too - as long as a few people contribute questions each month we will have enough to get by. There is also nothing stopping you from going back to old papers. In time we will have built up a question bank that can be useful for new people in the field, e.g. as introduction for new students.

PeerWise Introduction: https://peerwise.cs.auckland.ac.nz/docs/students/

The group is run by Erik Pelve, postdoc at Uppsala University who dabbles both in cell biology, evolution and ecology of the most interesting organisms in the world. I also run the twitter archaea outreach account ThirdDomain. For any question, don’t hesitate to get in touch: erik.pelve@ebc.uu.se

Join: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/archaea-online


Oktober 2016: Back to the classics - the paper who gave us one of the most known phylogenetic trees and the phylum korarchaeota
Tag: Barns_etal_1996
Perspectives on archaeal diversity, thermophily and monophyly from environmental rRNA sequences.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8799176

September 2016: Methane production in hydrothermal vents
Tag: Topcuoglu_etal_2016
Hydrogen Limitation and Syntrophic Growth among Natural Assemblages of Thermophilic Methanogens at Deep-sea Hydrothermal Vents.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27547206

August  2016: The untapped potential of archaeal pili
Tag: Makarova_etal_2016
Diversity and Evolution of Type IV pili Systems in Archaea
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27199977

September 2015: Let's start off the journal club with some ecology/metabolism. In a recent Nature paper Palatinszky et. al. finds a new way to feed into the nitrifyng process, with a little (a lot of) help from our friends the thaumarchaea.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26222031

August 2015: The first paper is THE first paper - Woese and Fox 1977, the first conceptual description of archaea as something other than bacteria.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/270744