Guidelines for laboratory poster presentations:

(This document based on material originally prepared by Dr. Jordan Fantini)

What's a "poster session"?

A poster is an effective way to share your group's experimental findings with the other students in your class. In the professional scientific world, it's the preferred way to present data that aren't yet ready for publication in print media. At major scientific conferences, convention halls may be filled with several thousand posters describing the attendees' research. Typically the people at the meeting will walk along the rows of posters, looking for research that interests them and stopping to talk with the presenters of posters that they find intriguing.

In our poster sessions, we'll do much the same thing -- each group will put up their poster, and then all of us -- students and teaching assistants and instructors -- will browse through the posters. Each group should plan to leave a representative by the poster at all times and should prepare a brief oral presentation of their work, to give to the persons who come by their poster. This oral presentation should NOT be elaborate, but it should serve to acquaint the audience with the reasons behind the choice of experiments and the major findings. If you do a good job and engage your audience, then you will have the opportunity to discuss your results and interpretation in much greater detail as they ask you questions. Please note that each group member should be prepared to discuss and/or explain the project using the poster as a visual aide. Also, do NOT plan to simply read from your poster!

Whether for a class project or a major international scientific meeting, the goals for a scientific poster should be much the same: to attract the attention of your audience, to introduce them to the issues you chose to explore, and to guide them through the experimental system and highlights of the data. Although a poster session is most decidedly NOT a design contest, presentation DOES matter. A poster that is cluttered, illegible, or too densely packed with text is apt to confuse or simply turn off your audience. And a poster that is too 'artsy' is apt to distract the audience from the data. The ideal is a design that is clear, clean, and that enhances the scientific message by attracting the eye of the reader and then leading it from point to point. Please do give some thought and creativity to the visual impact of your poster; your grade will take into account the effectiveness of your design.

For Biochemistry: This is an opportunity to go to the library and the web and the primary literature and find interesting insights about your experiments. Has anyone published results on a system like the one you studied? What is known about the active site of HRP? How can the structures of your enzyme and your inhibitors help you to better explain your data? Do your data agree with those of other investigators who have performed similar experiments? If not, how can you explain the discrepancy? (And don't immediately assume that you are simply "wrong" -- there is apt to be a more subtle answer!) In short, use the literature to improve your science!

For any comparison of kinetic parameters between experiments, proper use of statistical tests (e.g., confidence intervals, standard deviations) is critical. Reporting numbers with appropriate significant digits and measures of uncertainty (e.g., KM = 213 +/- 9 mM) ensures that your reader has the information s/he needs to evaluate your data and conclusions. Similarly, for comparing relative effectiveness of different inhibitors (potentially used at different concentrations), one should report Ki values, and for comparing catalytic efficiency under different conditions, one should report kcat values (think about why kcat is better than Vmax here). If you tried several different substrates, specificity constants would be appropriate. To calculate values for kcat or the specificity constant, you'll need the concentration of enzyme; this is only possible if you used commercially-obtained pure enzyme for your experiments.

As part of your discussion of your findings, you should present a figure illustrating your hypothesis for the structural features of the enzyme that would explain your results, and/or a mechanism for peroxidase action that is consistent with your data.

For Everyone: The poster display boards that we'll be using are large enough to hold a 3' x 4.5' poster. If you would like to print your poster as a single large panel, our department has a printer capable of printing a poster that's 42" x 42". To use this printer, prepare your poster as a single slide in MS Powerpoint, with a custom document size of 42"x42" and margins of 1.5 inches. When your document is ready, save it as a PDF. Full instructions for preparing and printing your poster will be available shortly.

Your poster should include:

Your title should, first and foremost, describe your primary hypothesis or primary finding(s). Titles and overall poster design can be -- and often are -- designed to attract the audience's attention, but they should nevertheless be clearly connected to the scientific core of the poster. Poster elements that your audience is apt to view as being solely provocative should be avoided.

Your introductory and background material should reference outside sources where appropriate. Such sources might include primary research literature, facts or figures from reference books, information from product manufacturers, diagrams or text taken off the web, or personal conversations.

Data should be neatly tabulated and graphs should be properly labeled. A brief description of the experimental procedure(s) (but not every detail!) should be included. This can take the form of a separate "Methods" section, or can be incorporated into your figure legends.

Printed text and labels should be large enough that they can be easily read from a distance of 4 feet by someone with normal eyesight. By the way, DON'T put all of your raw data on your poster (Biochem: don't include velocity vs. [S] tabulations); make critical choices as to what is relevant and interesting. And think carefully about placing information on your poster in such a way that the layout leads your reader's eye through the poster elements to enhance your message.

In thinking about your presentation, consider these fairly typical evaluation criteria for a scientific poster:

Everyone who is able to should plan on remaining for the entire poster examination period: hang out, look at others' posters, discuss them with the authors, compare your results with your classmates', etc. As an added incentive for you to really look at the other posters, we'll also have some balloting for the best poster presentations.

Additional resources: