Strategies in experimental biology

This course is a practical initiation to develop and manage a scientific project. Developing this skill is a major goal of the master's degree training program. Indeed, during the following 3 internships scheduled in the PLANT-Int program, students will join different teams, with the opportunity, in a working environment, to apply and develop the skills they acquired during this course. Overall, students will learn to carry out an integrative experimental project, from conception to realization, and to analyze and bounce back on results. Groups of 2 students will first address a question in the field of oxidative stress biology, rising at least 3 hypotheses they want to test. They will then design an experimental plan to test the different hypotheses. Three different approaches/biological models will be available: yeast physiology, enzymatic and analytic biochemistry and eukaryotic cell biology. Every group of 2 will develop 2 approaches on their own, while collaborating with another group for the third approach. Every group of 2 students will work in a collaborative and shared manner, working as a team on all 3 approaches. Results of the 2 groups will be integrated for the final analysis to be presented in written and oral reports.

Tutorials
· Using their knowledge in biology as well as bibliographic resources, the students design, implement and interpret their own experiments. Supervised by teachers, they develop two different approaches among:
· yeast physiology (phenotypic characterization of yeast mutants for oxidative stress response)
· cell biology (expression of key components of oxidative stress response in fibroblast cell lines for subcellular reorganization, expression and functional analysis).
· biochemistry (purification and characterization of an enzyme isoform involved in oxidative stress response).
· In addition, the students need to collaborate in order to cover the 3 topics, either experimentally on their own or by sharing results with another group. For that purpose, a mid-term progress meeting will be organized and evaluated between the groups that collaborate, under teachers' supervision.

Practical
The students will spend 10 full days (9 hours/day) of experimental work during two weeks, which they will organize according to their own specific experimental plans. Labs specifically equipped for the three different approaches are available at the CUBE experimental platform to perform the experimental work. A mid-term progress report meeting will be organized among co-working group of students belonging to PLANT-Int program under teachers' supervision. Every group of 2 students will present a report (by a short oral defense) to their pair group on the first obtained results. The strategy employed to integrate the collaborative work between partners will also be evaluated. Evaluation of the practical objectives will be performed during practical session using an evaluation grid.
Final integrative results will be presented in a written report (1 report/group of 2 students) and defended individually by students in front of a teachers' jury.