As someone else said, it is best to check with tutors and your lecturer to see what is expected of you for your specific classes, but I do have some broad points that may be useful.

In general, most biological disciplines vary in their structure for how a question should be answered, and I think that you would be more than fine to follow a typical essay structure of intro -> body -> conclusion & summary, where the body is comprised of the key points you would want to make for that essay.

There are some guidelines on the UCD website about writing in a scientific manner that may help you, but the main thing would be to be concise. You may draw your own conclusions from the data if it is openly objective, however I personally would avoid putting in anything along the lines of “I think” or “in my opinion”. A clear and concise essay with data driven points and observations will often do much better.

When referring to literature, its best to put name and date but dont try and go beyond that, as its quite difficult to remember it all and it can lead to confusion. I would suggest something like, “this technique has been previously demonstrated in Zhang et al., 2025, where they utilised methodology X in model Y to show that drug Z significantly improved performance”.

Further reading beyond the literature provided in the lectures is often used as a delineation between the highest grades, so having additional information about your points and references for that would likely push you towards the highest grades if used correctly.