GTChick:
What is your seminar class? Is it molecular bio, generla bio, or what?
I did my senior thesis on benefits and risks of water fluoridation. While researching it for a year, I ran into billions and billions of academic dentistry research articles. I really think a couple of good topics might include research that is being done on bacteria that resides in the mouth. They are doing a lot to elucidate how these bacteria can lead to the formation of caries, and a bunch of other dental-related diseases. In a lab I interviewed at for a job earlier this year, they were conducting a study on nine different types of bacteria found in people's mouths. Over the course of four years, they were collecting sample frome 200 different people's mouths every 6 months. They were trying to corellate relative concentrations of bacteria in people's mouths to the incidence of periodontal disease.
I would suggest going to your school's library, and using pubmed or medline and type in something like, "caries and fluoride" or "oral bacteria" or whatever sounds cool to you. You will get a bunch of random article and their abstracts. I went to a really small school, so we didn't carry most of the dental periodicals that my articles were found in, so I had to do an interlibrary loan. It takes about a week to get a hold of materials, so start searching early!
You would be surprised how long your presentation will be. I did a presentation in molecular bio on Transcription Factor 250 and it's ubiquitination of histone 1 (how random is that?) and it lasted a good 30 minutes. Get your hands on two or three GOOD articles, and understand them inside and out, and you will have a great presentation.
GOOD LUCK!
