Projects

Guidance for PPS '99-'00 Students Taking Projects

Project Choice

If you wish to take a project, you should choose a project title from the list and email your choice to your tutor before August 7.

The list of projects is available here.

We do not allow free choice of projects to help us ensure that the projects are new work. However, if you do wish to alter a project title - for example, to include a "case study" of a protein you have worked on - please do email your tutor.

Submission

You will need to submit your project by October 23. The project should be zipped or compressed into a single file and emailed to Dave Houldershaw. Dave will email the PPS mailing list with more details towards the end of your project work.

Assessment

We are expecting you to produce a Web review of your chosen area of protein structure. Although we expect you to be able to use the unique facility of the Internet, presenting images and linking to external sites, we do not expect you to become Web programmers. Obviously, if you already know Chime scripting, Perl or Java, and want to include these techniques, we will not mark you down!

The projects will be marked according to the following criteria:

Scientific content: 50%
Presentation, including layout and use of English: 25%
Use of the unique features of the World Wide Web: 25%

In previous years, projects that have been graded as "borderline pass" have typically been perfectly good as scientific reviews, but have not made full use of Internet material, images, and hyperlinks.

Projects will be graded simply into Pass and Fail; the pass mark is 50%. Projects submitted for a Certificate of Participation only are only expected to be "satisfactory" (score over 40%).

Previous Projects

The best way to find out what we are looking for in a project is to look at some previous examples. Projects from previous PPS courses are mounted on the Web:-

All PPS projects mounted anywhere on the Birkbeck hypertree have at least reached the standard required to pass.

We would particularly like you to look at the following excellent projects:

1997-8
- Liz Williams: The Perturbation of Sidechain pKa in Protein Structures
- Bernard DeBono: Convergent Evolution of Protein Structures (using Chime)
- Henrik Nielsen: NMR and X-ray Structures of Integral Membrane Proteins
1996-7
- John Coadwell: Structure and function of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) proteins
- Marialuisa Gazerro: The factors involved in protein thermostability

If you have any questions about the project procedure, please email me.

Clare Sansom, June 2000