by Langdan Zhu, Troy High School
Photo by Hans-Peter Gauster on Unsplash
After reading almost a hundred papers for my research project, I found that the most important, if not the most frequent, word in a paper’s abstract is…
Drum roll, please…
No, it is not abstract.
Drum roll continues…
It is “However”!
To get published, a study has to offer something new, providing some new findings or introducing a new technology to the world. Therefore its abstract is usually organized in the following way: the first few sentences were used to describe the current state of the arts (part 1); the next few sentences to point out the knowledge gaps in our current understandings or the limitations of the current approach (part 2); the rest of the abstract to summarize what authors did to close the gaps or to eliminate the limitations (part 3).
The word “However” is often used as the transitional word between part 1 and 2 of the abstract. Let’s look at an example (1):
“Brown adipose cells are specialized to dissipate chemical energy in the form of heat, as a physiological defence against cold and obesity. PRDM16 (PR domain containing 16) is a 140 kDa zinc finger protein that robustly induces brown fat determination and differentiation. Recent data suggests that brown fat cells arise in vivo from a Myf5-positive, myoblastic lineage by the action of PRDM16; however, the molecular mechanisms responsible for this developmental switch is unclear. Here we show that PRDM16 forms a transcriptional complex with the active form of C/EBP-β (also known as LAP), acting as a critical molecular unit that controls the cell fate switch from myoblastic precursors to brown fat cells. Forced expression of PRDM16 and C/EBP-β is sufficient to induce a fully functional brown fat program in naive fibroblastic cells, including skin fibroblasts from mouse and man. Transplantation of fibroblasts expressing these two factors into mice gives rise to an ectopic fat pad with the morphological and biochemical characteristics of brown fat. Like endogenous brown fat, this synthetic brown fat tissue acts as a sink for glucose uptake, as determined by positron emission tomography with fluorodeoxyglucose. These data indicate that the PRDM16–C/EBP-β complex initiates brown fat formation from myoblastic precursors, and may provide opportunities for the development of new therapeutics for obesity and type-2 diabetes.”
“However” here is important, because it divides the unknown from the known, separates the present from the past, alludes to the vision built on the reality, and presents the problem to solve. However can be replaced with similar words or expressions, such as at the same time, but and in contrast, which have basically the same function.
Science has advanced for the past thousands of years, because researchers and scientists identified millions of “however”s. I wish to solve a couple of “however”s in the future.
Reference:
1. Kajimura S, Seale P, Kubota K, Lunsford E, Frangioni JV, Gygi SP, et al. Initiation of myoblast to brown fat switch by a PRDM16–C/EBP-β transcriptional complex. Nature. 2009;460(7259):1154-8.