Tying up loose ends - Tom Braxton
Written by Thomas Braxton
Big Projects
We all have those big overarching projects that you have put hours and hours into, but it comes to the end and you put off those few finishing touches and little bits you say will only take an hour or two. Well, I have been finding out the hard way that those finishing touches often take much much longer than first expected. In 2017, I undertook a research project involving investigating the effect of thermoneutrality on the PWS-ICdel mouse (a mouse model of human Prader-Willi disease). After putting hundreds of hours of lab work in to collecting the data you would think the write up would be the easy part, but spoiler- it’s not. After many more hours put into the write-up it is finally at a point where it is ready to be submitted for review within the Journal of Endocrinology.
Loose Ends
Another loose end I’m currently working on tying up is not completely my own- I am currently supporting a fellow first-year CDT student in the role of a co-author. This is in hopes that together we can turn his systematic review (systematic review – assessment of methodologies, effectiveness and readiness for translation of orthopaedic bone gene therapy in non-rodent animal models) written as a first-year piece of coursework into a fully publishable paper. My main role as co-author so far is reading the 30 papers identified for inclusion within the systematic review and identifying their key findings and risk of bias. This will mean that we can compare findings in the same area to create a more robust systematic review.