The Biology Student Association held a meeting on Mar. 3 in the Science building at California State University, Stanislaus.
This was an informational meeting and student interactive activity about abstracts. As the biology students get ready for some research, it is important they understand the aspect of abstracts.
Before they began on abstracts, Darryl Kuhn was acknowledged for winning first place in the Undergraduate Natural and Physical Sciences- session B. Aaron Brown was recognized as well for winning second place.  Their research was on “Isolation and Identification of Bioplastic Degrading Bacteria.”
Abstracts are 200 word, one page summaries of research. All abstracts should have “attention grabbers,” that set the tone for the paper. If a student were to go to a conference, the only part published in the conference proceeding is the abstract. They are an important part of research and should have all concepts in place.
So, what should scientific abstracts have?  The  title, author(s), objectives of study/question/hypothesis, methods used, major results of study and conclusion(s)/implications of research.
The activity demonstrated consisted of looking at scientific abstracts. Students broke off into small groups to read different examples of abstracts and analyzed them knowing what they should consist of. Each group gave a small presentation on their findings.
The first group presented “Measuring Stress Levels on Guinea Pigs,” the second group presented “Antibiotic Kills pathogens Without Detectable Resistance,” the third group presented “Cytolytic Nanoparticles Attenuate HIV-1 Infectivity” and the last group presented “Phosphatidyl-myo-inositol Mannosyltransferase PimA is Essential for Mycobacterium Tuberculosis Growth In Vitro and In Vivo.”
The purpose was to see if each group could tell if each abstract consisted of all the elements needed. They all did, however, explaining these findings was difficult. Some abstracts were straight forward while others were much more complicated. The difficulties came from actually understanding what the abstract said, then to actually point out the elements of what makes an abstract.