ELN & Projects
ELN = Electronic Lab Notebook = Your Microbiology Diary
Should contain EVERYTHING you do related to the microbiology lab. Keep it organized and don’t get behind!
Learn how to describe your experiments, the results obtained, and what you’ve learned in your own words
This will be done a part of the ELN, your Electronic Lab Notebook. Ideally, you complete your ELN for each lab IN CLASS so you don’t have a lot of extra work at home. Keep up with it and don’t procrastinate. Word of caution: we change the exact requirements for each year and from section to section, so BE VERY CAREFUL if you obtain ELNs from your friends who took the class previously, the requirements will probably be different.
For me personally, the most important thing for the ELN is that you understand the purpose (Why?) of the experiments, how it works (How?). It’s also important for each unit to understand how the learning fits into the big picture of things and what you have actually gained from the experiment.
For the online lab – What to include on your ELN?
Things you want to include per ELN entry:
- Date
- Module title
- Objective/Purpose
- Materials
- Procedure and deviations of procedures, problems encountered, mistakes made…..
- Results (lots of pictures!) – and their description and interpretation and analysis. Include problems and things that did not work.
- Discussion
Also, make sure your ELN has a cover page and a table of contents and page numbers!
LEARNING GOALS
At the end of this lecture, students will be able to…
- Explain the importance of keeping an accurate and complete ELN
- Know how to format an ELN using styles, TOC, page numbers, etc.
- Understand how instructions to authors require formatting of the manuscript, figures, tables, legends, and references
HISTORY CONNECTION
If two scientists/inventors come up with the same idea and breakthrough at a similar time, who gets the right to win it and to hold the patent for a specific invention. You may have never thought about it, but patent litigations are often decided on (electronic) lab notebooks, date details, descriptions, and raw data found in these entries. Millions of dollars can be on the verge based on proper documentation of work done in research labs. One of the more recent cases is a fight about the patent for CRSPR, where the scientists were awarded a Noble price in Chemistry in 2020.
Check out this book “Code Breaker” or this documentary about CRISPR – The Movie – it’s a fascinating story
Similarly, if you work in the medical field, your patient data entry (“scribing”) fulfills a similar legal purpose. Your notes, detailed description of procedures, medication, etc. can mean life or death to your patients.
You may have never thought about why keeping detailed and personalized notes is so important. I have even seen job advertisements where the employer wanted to have the applicant skills that include maintaining a good laboratory notebook!
FORMATTING REFERENCE, FIGURES AND TABLES
While you are learning to keep a proper ELN, I also want to introduce you to the rules and guidelines on how to format text, figures, and tables for publications (we will talk about reference management and proper citations in another chapter).
We will start with instructions to authors for the ASM (American Society for Microbiology) Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education. I want you to have an understanding of how requirements to publish scientific work are a requirement for all scholarly publications. Detailed requirements for your ELN are explained by your instructor.
STRUCTURE OF YOUR ELN
Make sure you use
- styles (Title, headers..) and
- create a table of content
- have a cover page for your document
- use page numbers and a clear format.
- for all the acronyms you use make an index of abbreviation at the beginning or end of your document
- Name one section: “Useful Resources”
- keep experiments and results together in one section, even if you do something else in between. Have a date entry for the exact date you did the experiment (not when you wrote the notebook)
- use proper in text citations for your references, have a bibliography formatted according to ASM Manual (using your reference management software)
Check out my video on how to format your ELN
Keep experiments together, i.e., if you inoculate a culture on one day make sure the results from the next lab are adjacent to the description even if you did other things in between or in parallel
Make sure you check with the instructor of your sections to understand the specific expectations
Module Topic – Date
- Informal Introduction – what we actually did and WHY it’s important
- Objective – More or less from the module – indicate deviations
- Materials, Methods & Procedure – More or less from the module – indicate deviations
- Results
- Images – authenticated
- Raw data
- Analysis, graphs
- Interpretation
- Conclusion and Reflection
- What went wrong? Where was I confused? What did I learn from this exercise? What could I have done better?
- Connection Questions (if applicable) – how is this method/topic used in the scientific community (reference paper)
You can work in teams with a “lab partner” on your ELN, that means everything can be the same, EXCEPT you have to have both results indicating who it belongs to. You also need to interpret your results individually. EVERYONE is responsible to know how to do graphing, analysis, bioinformatics, etc.
IF we find that you are using an ELN from another student from a previous semester we will report you to the DSO immediately!
A generic ELN format is as follows,
