Purification of the exocyst complex and myosin XI from Physcomitrium patens & a Genre Analysis of the Stylistic and Structural Conventions in Biological Review Articles

Maurice, Rachel

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Purification of the exocyst complex and myosin XI from Physcomitrium patens & a Genre Analysis of the Stylistic and Structural Conventions in Biological Review Articles

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Vesicle trafficking is essential for many cellular functions and exocytosis refers to the vesicular transport of cargo such as lipids, proteins, and polysaccharides from within the cell to the plasma membrane. For specific, directed fusion and tethering of vesicles to locations on the plasma membrane, the transport process is regulated near and at the membrane by the exocyst, a multisubunit tethering complex. Despite its vital role in exocytosis, there are still questions regarding the structure, assembly, and regulation of the exocyst in plants. This project examines the exocyst’s role in polarized tip growth, which is why P. patens was used as a model system. Since polarized tip growth is also evident in root hair and pollen tube growth, exploring the role of the exocyst could have important agricultural implications. In this project, I used a transgenic line with mEGFP endogenously tagged to Sec6, the only exocyst subunit in P. patens with one isoform, and another line with 3mEGFP endogenously tagged to myosin XI to perform co-immunoprecipitation pulldown assays. I used these assays to explore questions related to their interacting proteins and what implications the interactors have for the location, assembly, and function of the exocyst in P. patens. This project was largely a hypothesis-generating study and based on what I learned, there are many directions for future exploration. I also performed a genre analysis on review articles, which are articles that evaluate recently published literature on a topic and synthesize relevant findings into a current overview of the field with the goal of identifying themes and gaps that emerge among a body of research, in the biological sciences. My central questions were about how one could define the genre of scientific review articles, especially the subset of reviews within the biological science, and what roles the reviews play in the scientific community. To learn about what the genre’s conventions were I focused my analysis on articles written within a discourse community and examined the structural and stylistic decisions the authors made within constraints of a journal’s publishing guidelines. Though many studies have sought to explore writing education in science, few have sought to explore current writing strategies in science, so this project sought to address that gap. I learned that there are three key organizational strategies, which I called the “timeline,” “claim-based,” and “topic/sub-topic based” approaches, that authors select to write reviews in and their choice is driven by their intended purpose and audience.

This report represents the work of one or more WPI undergraduate students submitted to the faculty as evidence of completion of a degree requirement. WPI routinely publishes these reports on its website without editorial or peer review.

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