Overview
Write an 6-8 page (over or under length will lead to point deduction), (double-spaced,
12pt Times New, 1’’ margins) paper (not including your references) on the mechanisms
by which anti-cancer drugs treat cancer. This will provide good background reading for
the final paper that you will write later in the semester which should make that paper
easier to write. There should be some unifying theme to the paper. For the paper, you are
asked to present a literature review of previous work related to genome-wide gene
expression responses to anti-cancer drug treatments. Genome-wide means that the
method used must be a genomic approach (microarray or RNA-seq). Genomic papers
will frequently also use a non-genomic approach in addition to a genomic approach,
but the main papers you use for your review must include a genomic approach to
assay gene expression. If you have questions about whether papers included these
experiments, ask me and I can tell you. You should minimally have 3-5 papers that use
genomics and if you want you can supplement or reinforce with non-genomic papers
(usually use only qPCR) to help the narrative of your paper. You should clearly state the
theme you have chosen to explore, justify the importance of this theme in a broader
context, describe the findings (to date) of relevant research on this theme and include a
summary of genomics techniques used by each paper described (e.g. RNA-seq, or
microarrays) and how they work. In addition, please explain what further research should
be done to follow up this work (which could include a description of the limitations of
previous research), and provide your ideas for future research. There is no page limit for
the cited references section but you should use more than just a couple of review articles,
the goal is to read primary literature. Any citation style that lists all reference information
(including title) can be used (please use an endnotes/bibliography section at the end rather
than footnotes), provided that you are internally consistent. Make sure to cite your sources.
DO NOT COPY AND PASTE TEXT WITHOUT PUTTING IT IN QUOTES AND CITING THE
SOURCE. That said, it is always better to paraphrase than to provide a bunch of direct
quotes,