Talk:Ribonuclease L

Peer reviews and responses during the educational assignment in 2014

Peer Review 1

The opening paragraph is good, but in the second sentence, it is not clear what is activated, what gets dimerized, and where 2’-5’A binds. Also, you introduce MDA5, but it is not specified what it is. It is described later on in the Functions section, but a brief intro here would be helpful. For example, you could say “…lead to activation of MDA5, an RNA helicase, and production of interferons.”

In the Synthesis and activation section, it is not necessary to include “…which has 4 genes coding for it in humans and 8 genes in mice.” You don’t elaborate on this, and the comparison doesn’t seem like the main purpose of your entry, so this should be excluded. Also in the same paragraph, the last sentence seems redundant. A possible alternative can be “The location of OAS in the cell and the length of the 2’-5’ oligoadenylate depends on the post-transcriptional and post-translational modifications of OAS.” In the same paragraph, the first sentence should be edited to include its importance (RNase L is present in very minute quantities during the normal cell cycle). I am guessing this happens because interferons are needed to actually activate the whole system, and the RNase L control being “leaky” is how these interferons can be produced.

In the next paragraph, it might be a better idea to combine the first two sentences by saying “The activation of OAS only takes place under a viral infection, during which a tight binding of the inactive form of the protein with a viral dsRNA (composed of the retrovirus’ ssRNA and its complementary strand) takes place.” Also, the third sentence might flow better with the paper if you said “2-5 A molecules then bind to RNase L, promoting its activation by dimerizing it.”

In the second paragraph in Functions section, you state that dsRNA activates MDA5, but happens with mRNA in presence of MDA5. The way you say it can be troubling to non-experts. There should be a clarification on how it actually gets activated (is it just DNA or mRNA binding or does it activate other proteins). Also in the same paragraph, you say that there are ds regions on RNA that have been cleaved by RNase L, and these regions have markers that are identified by RNAse L and MDA5. What is the importance of these markers if RNase has already cleaved?

The figure looks great, but on the bottom, you just have RNA cleavage producing MDA5. This might be confusing. You should specify that RNA cleavage activates MDA5. Other than that, it is a good summary of the Synthesis and activation and Function sections.

There are a variety of references, which is great. Overall, this was a great entry, with just a few grammatical errors. The information about the use of FRET was pretty groovy, since it relates to class topics. The figure was great, summarizing everything that was written. You should also include another figure of 2’-5’A since you go in a little bit of detail about it in the Synthesis and activation section. Nice entry to this page, it seemed pretty dull before. --Hsse27 (talk) 16:37, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

Peer Review 2

Content: I like that you expanded on the introduction section to give some more general detail for a quick glance; the original page was rather lacking in that respect. I think that you should work on expanding the clinical significance section, as that is important but the original page doesn’t offer very much explanation/detail for that. I liked what you did with the synthesis/activation section, which offers much more explanation from before and is easy to understand and helpful. You also did a good job of making sure hyperlinks and such are within the article. I guess that you could link interferon beta to this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interferon_type_I but it doesn’t really have its own page so I guess you have to do an “external” hyperlink. Still, it might be good to have that in there.

Figures: You should probably make the figure thumbnail larger. While it is a good picture & appropriate to help understand RNase L, the text is way too small to be able to see without clicking on it to enlarge the photo. Also, I think that you should make your caption brief & simply describe the steps of the pathway within the main body of your article. That being said, the figure itself looks great and simplifies the steps of the RNase L activation pathway. I also recommend moving it somewhere so that it more accompanies the activation section and not function…I know it’s kind of goofy because of the huge gray box on the right corner. Maybe you can try putting it on the bottom of the section so the section doesn’t get squeezed by two figures.

References: you have a couple references that say check isbn value. Probably shouldn’t be too much work, just make sure you clean them up since they’re in red text. Other than that, you did a good job of making sure that everything is cited. Also, not sure if you need to put your references under further reading, since the link/ID number for the article is already available. I would recommend just removing those from the further reading section.

Overall Presentation: I think that you did a great job of expanding the article and adding relevant information to it. There are some things that need to be cleaned up as far as formatting/presentation but it definitely looks much better than the original page. Your content itself I think is very good and you do a good job of explaining RNase L. You should continue to do that and add some more to the clinical significance section. Great job ☺ ~~Leeallens — Preceding unsigned comment added by Leeallens (talk • contribs) 13:56, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

GSI comments

Hi Anapkut,

Thank you for your addition to this page. Overall it looks very good. If you take into account the reviews comments above, I think you'll have an excellent page!

Also, just a few silly typos and style points. In the second paragraph you say upon twice in one sentence, which is awkward. Under Synthesis and Activation make sure there is space between sentences "form.A". I think you mean "then" but wrote "the" in sentence 5 (then spliced).You probably don't need to mention the Function section. As it's a short article, it won't be hard for the reader to find the section that contains more information about that specific topic if they so desire.

Under "Function", we usually talk about silencing protein expression or a gene rather than a molecule. While it's not incorrect to say that it's a molecule, people in the field will find it strange.

The fisrt two sentence of the "Clinical Significance" section say essentially the same thing. Try to make this flow a little better.

Overall, well done! Thank you!

~~Elizabeth — Preceding unsigned comment added by ChemStudent24601 (talk • contribs) 14:13, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

Suggestions from ChemLibrarian

Good work! A few suggestions here in addition to others' comments above.

1. The figure you added is great and could be larger as suggested by others. Please see Wikipedia:Picture tutorial for syntax to change the size and location of the figure. Also, it's great that you drew the figure yourself. But if the idea of the pathway is from specific article, you may want to cite it in the caption too. I noticed you used .jpeg for the figure, which is OK. But it is preferred to use PNG or SVG format since they are open format.If it's an option for the software you used to draw the figure, please change it. See Wikipedia:Graphics tutorialsfor more details.

2. The error message in the citation is caused by using a ISSN instead of an ISBN for the book. The ISBN for the book is 978-1-58829-418-0. Actually, this is a chapter of an edited book in a book series, you can cite it either as you do now as a book with the right ISBN or as a book chapter which has the similar format to a journal article.

3. I noticed that you added 5 references at the end for the Further Readings section. If you did want to do so, please use the same syntax as other ones in the section instead of adding them using the reference format (number inline and additional bibliographic lines shown at the end.) If you have cited them in the text, there is no need to add them in the Further Readings section.

Comments from the editors anapkut and mbrdgt

We addressed most of the issues, besides expanding clinical significance and adding a picture of 2'-5' oligoadenylate. The clinical significance was not expanded due to lack of time to further research. The picture was not added, because we did not think it was of a particular relevance to this page.