FSH 491 Course Reflection

This semester, I learned an enormous amount about topics related to the human gut microbiota, the research process, critical analysis of scientific literature, asking questions, and writing. The FSHN 491 class is extremely successful in its goals to teach students how to read, analyze, and write about scientific research literature. I am excited to take these skills and continue with an academic scientific training. Before I started the course, I knew very little about the human gut microbiota and the microbial metabolism and significance. Since this subject engulfs Dr. Stewart’s research interests, I was very eager to take the course to expand my knowledge. Throughout the curriculum, I learned about concepts such as alpha and beta diversity of gut microbiota, prokaryotic biology in terms of gene expression, and important metabolites of bacterial fermentation such as short-chain fatty acids (e.g. butyrate, propionate, acetate). Learning about the human gut microbiota helped me to understand potential mechanisms and explanations for findings in research presented in this class and other
I developed my skills further in the course by critically analyzing the research as well as developing a research question for the formal research paper. I started by choosing diet and gut microbiota and that proved to be far too broad. I refined my topic to vegetarian diets and gut microbiota and that was still too broad to discuss in a relatively short concise paper analyzing three research papers. My final research paper topic was effective in targeting a specific question by asking how do vegetarian diets affect human gut microbiota in short chain fatty acid metabolites. Learning how to ask specific research questions that have evidence to support their inception and theory is important to writing about existing research and always will prove key to conducting my own research in the