Revision, revision, revision

 A key thing I picked up on in this research article: it's always ok to rewrite everything.


For the last 2 days of module 2 (and the first 2 days of module 3), I came to the conclusion that my research article would conclude that my identified small molecules were only related by an amide, imino, or azido group, and there was nothing else that was interesting about them. To be fair, there are rather a lot of things that go into a molecule, and seemingly minor changes in a molecule (shift of a nitrogen atom from one carbon to the next one over) can seriously impact the biochemistry of a molecule. There's also the minor issue that interpreting the small molecules was the very last thing we did in the module, and therefore I spent more of my time fixing up the parts of the article that we had already done for homework. Also, it's generally hard for me to get into writing something without the enormous shadow of an imminent looming deadline. But I digress. The point is, I was really close to just designing my small molecule figure to highlight just those single functional groups which I found interesting. 

Of course, I wouldn't be writing about this if that was actually the case. As I constructed the figure, I noticed that the small molecules actually kind of looked similar to some of the molecules discussed in 7.05 (biochemistry, in case you're not familiar with biology course numbering schemes at MIT). Notably, there were thiazole groups, and nucleotide fragments in each of the small molecules we were supposed to analyze for similarities. Heck, one of the molecules straight up had a dangling thymine hanging off the end of it. Of course, I had to notice this only 6 hours before the deadline to submit the project (pre-extension; thanks Anonymous Mouse!) which meant a lot of extensive rewriting and finding places that referenced my earlier, probably more boring conclusion. 

But there's no point in life without a little bit of excitement here and there, so I found myself slowly plodding through sections of my paper, fixing up each mention of amide and imide bonds while double checking that my classification was correct. And in the process of doing so, I found so many small errors (misnumbered figures are the absolute worst when you have to shift everything by 1) that a lot of the paper basically had to be rewritten. So yes, it's hard to have to throw away all of your work. But sometimes, the benefits far outweigh the costs.


- Prem

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