How to Read Science Research, Chapter 9: Looking at Pictures and Reading Further
We’ve previously talked about why we read science research, what we need to know about science to understand science research, and how to read an abstract. Today, we will talk about what else we can learn from the rest of the articles. We will finish our discussion of the article on FisB and bacterial membranes.
Last time, we discovered that the abstract summarizes the entire experiment, which told us that:
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. FisB requires those big-word processes and the membrane shape made while eating to get things to the right place and break the membrane, but doesn’t rely on other big-word processes.
The big questions we will address today are:
How do we know?
Why do we care?
“How do we know?” is a big question that is answered by the experiment, but experiments are often described in an extremely technical way that may not be helpful to most readers. In fact, the experiments need to be described in so much detail because a big part of science is being able to do experiments on the same topic many times and in many ways so we can be confident that the conclusions we’ve drawn are as well-supported as possible.
As non-scientist readers, we can often get some big ideas about the “how” by looking at the pictures. Pictures in science research are often diagrams, tables, and graphs. These pictures can display the data in a way that makes it easier to understand the big patterns and ideas without needing to know the details of the experiment or the data analysis that was done.
The first set of images in our FisB paper have some cool diagrams. The images, reproduced below, are overwhelming to look at all at once, so it can be helpful to start in one spot and grab what we can, ignoring what we don’t understand.
These images are labeled A-H, so it’s easy to start with A. In A, we have a diagram that shows a process, which we can tell because it’s a series of small images with arrows between them. The big label is “Sporulation”, which we previously learned is reproduction of bacteria. We can see what a single bacterium is doing here to reproduce. The part that sticks out to me is “membrane fission” on the bottom left of Figure A, because that’s where FisB comes into the story. This helps me see exactly what part of the process we’re learning about.
Figures D and E look cool, but are harder to understand. There are three columns of photos labeled “1.5h”, “2.5h”, and “3h”, which makes me think we’re looking at the same process in Figure A, but in real time. The pictures go from few bacteria to lots of bacteria, which supports my idea that we’re looking at sporulation/reproduction over time. The three rows of photos are labeled “mGFP”, “membrane”, and “merge”. It looks like they’ve highlighted different parts of the bacteria for each of these rows. I know that GFP stands for green fluorescent protein, which is a protein that glows green and is often used to see cells better. I think that the “mGFP” row has bacteria highlighted with “mGFP” and the “membrane” row has bacteria whose membranes are highlighted. “Merge” probably shows bacteria whose membranes are highlighted and also are highlighted with mGFP. Lastly, I see that Figures D and E have different labels at the bottom. Figure D has “native levels” and Figure E has “low levels”, with some abbreviations that include FisB. I think Figure D shows sporulation with normal amounts of FisB and Figure E shows sporulation with low levels of FisB, which makes sense based on what we’ve read, which is that FisB is necessary for sporulation. There appears to be a lot more sporulation/reproduction in Figure D, with more FisB, than in Figure E, with less FisB.
That’s an example of how we might get some information about how scientists found out that FisB is important in bacterial sporulation. I didn’t go back into the text to confirm my initial thoughts because I want to show you what it’s like to draw conclusions from pictures somewhat quickly. This also helps us understand a little better what was done in the experiment (bacteria were observed during reproduction with different ways of highlighting the cells) and how the scientists drew their conclusions (it looks like there was more reproduction with more FisB and less reproduction with less FisB). If you want or need more information, you can go back into the passage, read the image captions, or even Google some key words or figure labels. If you repeat this process for the other groups of images in the article, you can learn even more about the “how” and “why”.
The last big question is always “Why do we care?” The Discussion section of a paper is a good place to find this information. This section often discusses how this information can be used for future research and real-world applications, as well as some of the important limitations of the research that was done (ie what we still don’t know).
The discussion starts by saying “Previously, we showed that FisB is required for the membrane fission event that marks the completion of engulfment of the forespore by the mother cell [23]. Here, we found that a cluster of FisB molecules is nearly always present at the membrane fission site as evidenced by an ISEP using fluorescently tagged FisB.” The scientists are saying that they previously described how one part of membrane fission works and now they’re describing how another part of membrane fission works. The “why” seems to be learning more about how bacterial reproduction works.
I don’t expect this guide on reading science research to make you an expert on all science research. Nobody is an expert on all science research. I hope this guide will help you learn one more thing every time you click through a citation link to a research paper, but I also hope it was raise many more questions that will encourage you to investigate further, sometimes, when you want to.