Title My Talk!

In our program, every year each Ph.D. student must present their data in an hour-long talk to the entire department. I always kind of figured this was standard practice in graduate school, though in talking to students in other programs at this university and those at other universities altogether, it seems like the majority never give a talk to the entire department until their thesis defense. Personally, I like the way we do things here – it’s a great way to practice giving talks in front of an audience, keeps everyone abreast of your research, and often results in great suggestions from PIs outside your thesis committee which you may otherwise have never received.

I may, however, feel this way because I have zero problems with standing in front of a room and talking, unlike the standard stereotypical scientist. Plus, even though I generally don’t have much data to share (who wants to look through 500 coomassies that show my inability to purify a particular protein?) the techniques I use are completely different from others in my program, so by default, my talk is always new and interesting, which forces people to pay attention. My program is in cancer biology, rather than biochemistry or pharmacology or structural biology, so we are tied together by the fact that we study cancer, not by the way in which we study cancer. 98% of the program studies cell signaling and knockdown genes in cells and in animals, and while they produce some hot science and generate some pretty cool results, the techniques they use are all same old, same old in so much as we see the same thing every week.

Then I come along, and my results come from surface plasmon resonance and circular dichroism and fluorescence polarization, and I talk about things like molecular modeling with structures from co-crystallization. While nobody would ever stop and explain how to “read” a Western or a Kaplan-Meyer plot, I can’t exactly put up a CD spectra and make a statement about the structure of the protein without taking the time to explain a little about CD, or throw up a graph with polarization that shows that my small molecule displaces a peptide without a few cartoons showing how FP works. That’s what I love about my project – even though it’s taking me a long time to generate worthwhile data, my presentations are always interesting, because I am the black sheep of the program doing something COMPLETELY different than everyone else (all biochemistry/biophysics), and people are interested to learn about what it is that I am doing.

That said, tomorrow I give my once yearly talk, and happen to also be going for the double-whammy and also having a thesis committee meeting (it is not, however, standard to have committee meetings every three months at this university… the program asks for every 6 months, most people aim for once a year, and I obviously pick up their slack by squeezing in extra meetings in the middle). So, as I sit here looking over my slides for tomorrow’s presentations, I find myself unsure what to title my talk.

Should I opt for:
(a) 1001 Ways Not To Purify Protein X
(b) 50 Unsuitable Buffers for Circular Dichroism of Protein Y
(c) Protein X and Protein Y Interact But You Probably Don’t Care, and I Really Don’t Either
or
(d) Protein Y Isn’t Improperly Folded, It’s Simply Structurally Ambivalent

Other suggestions welcome.

Also, since Protein X is a helicase, I think I need to fit this somewhere in my talk: