Summer 2025 Research Prep Journal
Welcome to my research journal for summer 2025! Here, I document all of the papers I review every week. For each paper, I have written a summary that can be found by pressing the name of each paper on the right.
Week 6: August 11 – August 17
Monday, August 11
Finished taking notes on IEF. Made slides for IEF.
Tuesday, August 12
Recorded IEF. Began taking notes on Chromatography.
Week 5: August 4 – August 10
Wednesday, August 6
Finished recording and editing Agarose Gel Electrophoresis video. Worked on lab techniques webpage and resources webpage.
Friday, August 8
Finished notes on PAGE. Wrote slides for Immunology overview.
Saturday, August 9
Wrote slides for PAGE. Recorded both PAGE and Immunology videos.
Sunday, August 10
Uploaded videos. Began taking notes on IEF.
Week 4: July 28 – August 3
Thursday, July 31
After reflecting on the yield I'm gaining from reading papers and how I could better utilize my time, I am planning to shift to more "skills" based preparation this summer. That is, I will be learning about various lab techniques, how they work, when and why they're used. I will also shift to do more self-study in topics within the Life Sciences that are adjacent to molecular biology, such as Physiology, Immunology, and Microbiology. I will continue working through my reading list, but definitely at a much slower pace.
Friday, August 1
Compiled a list of lab techniques that I will be going over. I started with the lab techniques that are covered in the MCAT, as that is a adequate benchmark for early undergrad. After finishing that list, I will go back and add any other techniques.
Saturday, August 2
Began researching Gel Electrophoresis. Although I've done this technique before, there are a lot more applications that I was unaware of, such as all the sub-branches of PAGE.
Sunday, August 3
Finished writing notes for Agarose Gel Electrophoresis. Next up is PAGE.
Week 3: July 21 – July 27
Thursday, July 24
Began reading Brenner, Jacob and Meselson's 1961 paper.
Friday, July 25
Finished summary for Brenner, Jacob and Meselson's paper. Despite being so short, I struggled a lot with this one. A lot of the methods used took me a while to understand, and made me realize how important learning lab techniques are for even understanding papers. Anyway, my notes can be found here.
Week 2: July 14 – July 20
Monday, July 14
Today I began going through Jacob and Monod's paper on gene regulation of protein synthesis in E. coli. Originally, I was very intimidated at the length, but this paper is free from any methods, experimental, or discussion section, as it all seems the authors incorporated all of them into each topic. And so, I will probably spend a day or two unpacking the five sections of this paper one by one and understanding each section thoroughly, rather than going at it all at once. Today, I went through section one, and took very minor notes, but mainly tried to get accustomed to the writing.
Tuesday, July 15
I went through the first two sections (~11 pages) of Jacob and Monod's paper I started yesterday. I realized that this paper, for the most part, almost reads as a textbook, presenting culminating ideas for genetic induction and repression. Although interesting, I decided my time would be better suited to move on. However, I still decided to take notes on the first third of the paper to practice analysing these types of articles. My notes can be found here.
Wednesday, July 16
Finished reading Jacob and Monod's paper.
Friday, July 18
Wrote summary for Nirenberg and Matthaei's 1961 paper.
Saturday, July 19
Finished analysis of Nirenberg and Matthaei's 1961 paper. This was such an interesting paper, and was the first paper with methods and discussion I analyzed (I guess Meselson and Stahl's 1958 paper also counts, but it was very short). Even though today it seems obvious, it is still mindblowing to see the discovery of codons, and I could feel their excitement when they synthesized poly-phenylalanine using polyuridylic acid. Such awesome stuff. My notes for the paper can be found here.
Week 1: July 7 – July 13
Thursday, July 10
Created Zotero - Obsidian workspace for the analysis of research papers.
Saturday, July 12
Created Summer 2025 Journal Webpage.
Sunday, July 13
Read and analyzed Meselson & Stahl's 1958 paper on “The replication of DNA in Escherichia coli” as an introduction to research paper analysis. My notes for it can be found here.