Module 1 Debriefing

I think that, while I got a good idea of the big picture of Module 1 from lectures, and especially what future works/projects could look like, I would’ve wanted a bit more detail about how to analyze our results. The focus of the lectures seemed to be “what to do with the molecules you just found,” but most of the class work was focused on preparing to find the molecules. As in, I understood the process for identifying hits just fine, but looking at the molecules, I would’ve appreciated a bit more knowledge about what to do with these molecules. I identified some similarities, but I’m not sure what more we could do with that. Like, once you have identified that there are these similarities, how do you identify which is the best, how to merge them, or how to create a better molecule? The lectures about ‘where to go from here’ seemed to assume that you had chosen a molecule for further testing, but given that we got a multitude of hits, how exactly would you determine which to move forward with? I understand that since this is a class focused on laboratory fundamentals, much of the in class work would be basic techniques like gel electrophoresis or protein purification, but I felt like the actual analysis of the SMM data was super brief and felt rushed, mostly because the amount of focus in that on lectures made it seem like it would be a more involved process. I think in the future having an in-lab debrief about class results/what our instructors think of the data we collected would be useful in knowing if we actually found anything useful. Or even a mention of what the class’s best hit was, and if anything about that drug was known could be interesting. I guess I just would’ve liked a more concrete follow up of the hits we found.