How to Read Science Research, Chapter 8 (Part 1): Reading an Abstract

The abstract of a peer-reviewed journal article is like a short, dense summary of all the information in the whole article. Often, it’s the only part of the article available for free, so it may be all we have to read.

Many articles, following the abstract, will have the following pieces:

Introduction: provides any background information needed to understand the research that was done

Methods: describes how the experiment was done (sometimes put at the end of the paper)

Results: describes the data that were collected and any statistical analysis or graphs

Discussion/Conclusion: summarizes data in a bigger context, talks about what conclusions can and cannot be drawn, and/or suggests ways to explore the topic further

The abstract might have one sentence to summarize each of these sections, which is why it’s so dense. It also has a wealth of information, which we can interpret if we think of the different sections being summarized, how to decipher big science words, and how experiments are designed.

The following excerpt is from PLOS, an open-source (free), nonprofit collection of science research articles. It’s the article I mentioned in Chapter 6: Deciphering Big Science Words, which I highly recommend you read before digging in here. Don’t worry; I’ll be breaking the text down into bite-sized pieces.

Little is known about mechanisms of membrane fission in bacteria despite their requirement for cytokinesis. The only known dedicated membrane fission machinery in bacteria, fission protein B (FisB), is expressed during sporulation in Bacillus subtilis and is required to release the developing spore into the mother cell cytoplasm. Here, we characterized the requirements for FisB-mediated membrane fission. FisB forms mobile clusters of approximately 12 molecules that give way to an immobile cluster at the engulfment pole containing approximately 40 proteins at the time of membrane fission. Analysis of FisB mutants revealed that binding to acidic lipids and homo-oligomerization are both critical for targeting FisB to the engulfment pole and membrane fission. Experiments using artificial membranes and filamentous cells suggest that FisB does not have an intrinsic ability to sense or induce membrane curvature but can bridge membranes. Finally, modeling suggests that homo-oligomerization and trans-interactions with membranes are sufficient to explain FisB accumulation at the membrane neck that connects the engulfment membrane to the rest of the mother cell membrane during late stages of engulfment. Together, our results show that FisB is a robust and unusual membrane fission protein that relies on homo-oligomerization, lipid binding, and the unique membrane topology generated during engulfment for localization and membrane scission, but surprisingly, not on lipid microdomains, negative-curvature lipids, or curvature sensing.

That’s a lot of information that can feel, at first, incomprehensible. Let’s break it down.

Little is known about mechanisms of membrane fission in bacteria despite their requirement for cytokinesis.

Some words we might be able to guess or google, or we already know: mechanism - way of doing something; membrane - outside of something like a cell; fission - breaking apart; cytokinesis - part of cell reproduction that involves the cell splitting in two

With that information, we can now interpret that sentence as saying: scientists don’t know much about how bacteria break their membranes, even though they need it for the splitting part of cell reproduction. Let’s look at more.

The only known dedicated membrane fission machinery in bacteria, fission protein B (FisB), is expressed during sporulation in Bacillus subtilis and is required to release the developing spore into the mother cell cytoplasm.

Some big words: sporulation - creating of spores, which are part of reproduction for some organisms; expressed - in biology, it usually means shown or created; Bacillus subtilis - a species of bacteria; cytoplasm - the liquid inside a cell

This next sentence seems to say: FisB is made during spore production in these bacteria and is needed for the spore to get into the mother cell. This is the only known machinery for breaking bacterial membranes.

Let’s do one more today. We can finish the rest next time.

Here, we characterized the requirements for FisB-mediated membrane fission.

In science, “characterized” usually means “described”, which is a very important step in the process of developing an understanding of why and how things happen. This sentence is saying: in this experiment, we described what has to happen for FisB to help break membranes.

To summarize what we’ve learned from this abstract so far: Scientists don’t know much about how bacteria break their membranes, even though they need it for the splitting part of cell reproduction (see how much easier that part is to understand, now that we’ve dug even deeper?). FisB is made during spore production in these bacteria and is needed for the spore to get into the mother cell. This is the only known machinery for breaking bacterial membranes.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of Chapter 8: Reading an Abstract.