Do’s:
i.Dress properly and formally. A formally dressed person shows people that he means business and that he is serious about what he does.
ii.Exude confidence – but don’t ooze it. No one likes an over confident person but then, no one can even tolerate or waste time on someone’s who’s so nervous he can’t even pronounce his name. Smile at yourself in front of a mirror and boost yourself up with some good old-fashioned pep talk.
iii.Read a lot of books. This is a habit one MUST develop to sound intelligible on a number of topics.

There are 3 primary types of GD depending on the kind of supervision during the entire course of the GD. They are:

i.Freewheeling –
In this, there is no external supervision. The candidates are asked to gather in a room and are allowed to get acquainted with one another. They are allowed a period of time to organise their ideas and decide on the Initiator, the Summarizer and the other members. The candidates are to decide on everything including the placement of the chairs and the order in which they will speak.
This type of GD helps the management to assess the organisational and leadership skills of the candidates.

ii.Monitored -
An external supervisor decides on everything about the GD including the order of the members. This is the simplest form of GD.
This is done mainly to assess the performance of the candidates under external pressure – in this case, the external pressure is simply, the presence of the supervisor.

iii.Audio visual supervision -

We worked on this form of communication in our last multimedia lab session.

It is surprising how important group discussions, or GDs as they are more commonly called, are to any ambitious individual in today’s world. Almost all job interviews, entrances to MBA colleges etc. require a candidate to pass the GD session.

GDs consist essentially of a group of people who talk about a given topic, with or without supervision, and try to arrive at a sensible conclusion.

A GD consists of 3 main sessions:

i. Brainstorming –

Firstly, they are completely different from peer reviewed journals.

Review articles are usually written by one or more writers to summarize all the research, past and present on a particular topic. It involves searching everything relevant to the topic and organising it into a logical sequence.

Review articles usually involve an abstract (the same as a research article),background information on the topic, past and current available data, future researches, results and conclusions formed. Citing references is extremely important to a review article because they not only clear all charges of plagiarism, thus establishing credibility of the author, but also help lay down a strong foundation for the work.

Review Articles help one learn about the main people working in a given field, recent major advances and discoveries, significant gaps in the research,current debates and ideas of where research might go next.

Peer review or refereeing is a process to ensure that the articles they publish include only the best erudition currently available. The articles submitted to a peer reviewed journal are sent out by editors to other scholars in the same field (or narrowly defined field) to obtain an impartial review on the quality of the scholarship, its relevance to the field, its appropriateness for the journal, etc.

Practically speaking, peer reviewed journals are considered as more reliable sources of information than others since peer review refers to the work done during the screening of submitted manuscripts and funding applications.

This process allows only authors to meet the standards of the magazine and dissuades unwarranted claims and personal points of view that cannot be corroborated.

Journals that do not follow this process cannot generally be counted on for solid, scientific scholarship.

References:
•http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_review

The other day I was going through some scientific journals in college. They were so interesting that I had to go look them up online.

I found that there were 3 main types of articles: regular research articles, review articles and peer reviewed articles. How are they different from each other?

An objective of organizing a research paper is to allow people to read one’s work selectively.

Usually, abstracts are made first which are submitted to a journal. Abstracts are concise single paragraph summaries of completed work or work in progress. They help a reader learn the rationale behind the study, general approach to the problem, relevant results, and important conclusions or new questions. Abstracts are usually around or less than 200 words.

Research articles usually contain: a summary or “abstract”, a description of the research, the results they got and the significance of the results.

These are also known as Nuclear receptors, though some are actually located in cytosol rather than the nuclear compartment.

Eg. : receptors for steroid hormones, thyroid hormone, Vit – D etc.

Most receptors are located in the nucleus and the ligands are all lipophilic compounds which can actually cross the cell membrane.

For eg., Glucocorticoids inhibit transcription of the gene for cyclo oxygenase-2 (Cox -2) which may account for their anti – inflammatory properties whereas mineralocorticoids stimulate the production of various transport proteins involved in renal tubular function.

It has rapid effects on metabolism, exerted via altered activity of enzymes and transport enzymes. Insulin has longer term actions via altered enzyme synthesis.

Mechanism of Action

Insulin binds to a specific receptor on the surface of its target cells. The receptor is a large transmembrane glyco – protein complex consisting of 2 α subunits and 2 β subunits. The α subunits are entirely extracellular and each carries an insulin binding site, whereas the β subunits are transmembrane proteins with tyrosine kinase activity. This activity is suppressed by the α subunits, but insulin binding causes a conformational change that depresses (activates) the tyrosine kinase activity of the β subunits which act on each other (autophosphorylation) and on other target proteins.

A single transmembrane helix links the outer receptor domain with the inner kinase domain. Ligand eg. Growth factor binding leads to dimerisation of pairs of receptors. The association of the 2 intracellular kinase domains allows an autophosphorylation of tyrosine residues to occur. The autophosphorylated tyrosine residues then serve as high affinity binding sites for other intracellular proteins, which form the next stage in the signal transduction cascade. One important group of such adapter proteins is known as the SH2 domain proteins.

These are also known as metabotropic receptors or 7-trans-membrane spanning receptors. They are membrane receptors which are coupled to intracellular effector systems via a G protein.

G- proteins and the role of G- proteins

These were called as G proteins because of the interaction with the guanine nucleotides, GTP and GDP.

G –proteins consist of 3 sub unite α, β and γ. Guanine nucleotides bind to the α sub unite which has enzymatic activity catalysing the conversion of GTP to GDP. The β, γ subunits remain associated as βγ complex. All 3 subunits are anchored to the membrane through a fatty acid chain. G – proteins appear to be freely diffusible in the plane of the membrane.