Talk:Synergistic catalysis

Page created as course work under Education Program

Hello, we are working on this page for an advanced chemistry course under the Wikipedia Education Program. More content to be added in the next couple of days. Please do not delete this part as a stub. Thank you! ChemLibrarian (talk) 02:33, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

Peer review and responses during the educational assignment in Fall 2013

Peer Review

Overall, things looked pretty good. You clearly put a lot of work into your figures and you did a good job creating a new page from scratch. You were especially good about referencing other Wikipedia pages whenever appropriate. Biggest things to work on would be including some higher profile authors, fixing discrepancies in your figures, and referencing some non-journal articles. You did a really good job of clearly defining the different types of multicatalyst systems and explaining where synergistic catalysis fits into the picture. Once you make your examples a little more clear, you’ll have a really strong article!

Content

The introductory section does a good job of giving a basic and easy to understand overview of the topic. However, it may be a good idea to cite additional sources in this section. For example, how do you know how synergistic catalysis differs from other multicatalyst systems? It would be a good idea to cite this fact. The contents of each section are well worded and concise, but you may wish to put subheadings in the “examples” section. I believe you list two examples, but they blend together and it can be confusing when you switch from one to the next. Also, at first glance it seems your “examples” section has only one example in it, which doesn’t make much sense. You may also consider moving your “in Biology” section to a subsection in the “Examples” section. It seems like it may fit better there. You did a good job linking all of the more technical terms to other Wikipedia pages.

Your “in Biology” section implies that the only example of synergistic catalysis in biology is reactions using NADPH. I think NADPH is a fine example to highlight, but you may want to make it clear that there are many other examples. There are also some grammatical errors in this section that you may want to clean up for clarity. Perhaps a better wording of your sentence “They occur by.…. an activate hydride” would be “An example of synergistic catalysis in biology is the enzymatic activation of a small molecule followed by reduction with NADPH, which donates an activated hydride.” You may also want to make sure this example actually fits your definition of synergistic catalysis; it seems more like double activation since the same molecule is acted on by the enzyme and NADPH. Synergistic catalysis would have to involve one molecule interacting with the enzyme followed by a different molecule interacting with NADPH. The two molecules could then interact with each other.

Your first highlighted example seems to be a good one. It’s been cited 52 times and does a good job illustrating the topic. However, your second example is based on a rather new paper which has only been cited once. While it’s possible that the impact of this paper will go up with time, it seems you may have been wiser to use a more established paper from a more established author in the field. If a person were to only learn of one example of synergistic catalysis, is this really the best option? Also, you cite this paper (Enantio- and Diastereodivergent Dual Catalysis: α-Allylation of Branched Aldehydes) as Carreira et al. which seems inappropriate since Carreira is not the listed first author. You also cited the first example by the last listed author rather than the first (Ito et al.). I think in general you may want to include some better known papers in your page. The biggest name in the field seems to be Xu Qiang, but you haven’t included his review of synergistic catalysis from 2013 or any of his papers (one of which is the most cited paper on this topic with 113 citing references, according to Scifinder).

You seem to have picked a good topic that was under-represented on Wikipedia. I found no evidence of duplicative content.

Figures

Your figures are well made and do a good job of illustrating the concepts discussed in your text. The only issue I found is some discrepancy between your first and second pictures. They seem to describe the same concept, but you introduced the abbreviation “iPr” in the second figure for the isopropyl group. First of all, the superscripted “i" is somewhat difficult to read. Second, you should probably stay consistent with your abbreviations. The “iPr” was not used in the first figure. Also, you differ on the cyanide group. I think the error is in the first molecule where the CN connects at the N instead of the C. Everywhere else it seems to connect at the C.

References

You had all 8 references. However, it seemed that they all came from scientific journal sources. You may want to include some books or some more user friendly resources that would be more appropriate for a Wikipedia audience.

Biomedchemist (talk) 02:42, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

WIKIPEDIA PROJECT – PEER REVIEW

CONTENT/FIGURES

First off, this is a really cool topic and has a huge amount of potential value in synthesis! The intro is pretty good and summarizes the concept well. One suggestion; In the Anna Allen Chem Sci paper, there is a really good figure (Figure 1.) that outlines the synergistic catalysis really well. I am a much more visual person and that figure helped me to understand this concept much better. I feel molecular orbit descriptions are much more clear with a figure accompanying. Also maybe you could highlight a few of the applications/benefits in the intro.

In the background section, You have done a very good job of giving a big picture to the various types of catalysis. Toward the end you indicate there are some quenching issues involved with synergistic catalysis. Perhaps you could summarize a few of the approaches to avoiding this such as using a hard Lewis acid and a soft Lewis base. Also, this might be a good spot to show how biological systems avoid this issue via proximity effects etc…

The dihydrofolate reductase in the biology section is a good example, but it reads a little rough. I this that it would be a bit easier to read if it was connected back to the original concept of synergistic catalysis. For example, it states ‘They occur by a molecule binding to a protein as a substrate and becoming active and typically being reacted with NADPH which is essentially an activate hydride.’. Binding doesn’t necessarily indicate the substrate becomes ‘activated’, but rather it is the basic residue acting as the ‘catalyst’ that activates dihydrofolate. Also, biological synergistic catalysis does not always use NADPH, but is capable of using a variety of activated substrates.

The examples are very good choices that demonstrate the range of potential for synergistic catalysis. Maybe the insertion of subcategory headers prior to each example will help this section read a bit easier and keep them from running together? Nice work on the figures. They all look really clear and are easy to read. This section cites the journals as you would in a publication and I’m not sure if this is appropriate for Wikipedia, since the general public may not have access to these journals?

REFERENCES

The references used are all good and linked correctly. It doesn’t look like there are any sources that are non-journal. I don’t know how much you can find on synergistic catalysis that is a non-journal type publication but there are a few books out there such as “Mechanical Catalysis: Methods of Enzymatic, Homogeneous, and Heterogeneous” and other various catalysis textbooks.

OVERVIEW

Overall this is a great article! Really cool topic and the figures all look excellent! The citations, links and sections are all done nicely and work well. I know you already have a ton of figures well over what was required for the project, but like I stated above, a recreation of the Allen figure would really help with clarity in the intro. A little more info on the benefits, and current progress of this topic would be nice (just for curiosity sake).The use in biology section could use a little rewording and clarity. Other than that, well done! I know I listed a lot of things, but they are just some ideas I had while reading through the article. Overall, nice work on creating a new wiki page!

Zwickipedia (talk) 18:43, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Additional Comments

Excellent job on the site! It will make a great contribution to Wikipedia. The peer reviewers also did an excellent job and I have nothing to add. Great job!

UMChemProfessor (talk) 01:37, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Suggestions from ChemLibrarian (talk) 15:48, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

1. Just a couple of suggestions for the images. I see your images are mostly in .jpeg. Actually, Wikipedia recommends "The basic choices are SVG for simple diagrams (especially those that need to be scaled), JPEG for photographic images, and PNG for everything else" as discussed on this page Wikipedia:Preparing images for upload. So, if you drew these diagrams in ChemDraw, it's better to save them as .png . If you are using other tools allowing saving as .svg, that would be the best.
2. You might want to add captions to your images so that you can refer to them in the text.

Responses to Peer Reviews and Comments

First of all, thank you to all the reviewers for your constructive and thoughtful suggestions. In accordance with your feedbacks, we have made the following changes to our page:

1. Added subheading for each examples under “Examples” section

2. Moved “In Biology” under “Examples”

3. Changed citation to ‘First Author’ et al.

4. Changed all isopropyl group in the figures to ‘iPr’

5. Corrected cyanide group connection in the figure

6. Added figure to illustrate the molecular orbital description for the narrowing of HOMO-LUMO energy gap

7. Updated all figures to PNG format.

8. A textbook source was added as per the suggestion of the reviewers.

9. The sentence in the introduction pointed out by biomedchemist has been removed as it was both a duplicate with a sentence in the background and is explained in some more detail in background.

10. With regards to the comment of the In Biology section about NADPH in the reaction given, the section has been reworded to clarify the role of NADPH. As a whole the biology section has been reworded and clarified.

Nonetheless,

1. We decided to keep the example by Krautwald et al. Even though it’s a relatively new paper, we think the simultaneous control of two stereogenic center by using two catalysts demonstrated in the paper is rare. Not to mention the absolute selectivities are really impressive.

2. The review mentioned by the reviewer biomedchemist was not used as it is far too specific for the purposes of this article as a general overview of synergistic catalysts.

3. The paper suggested by biomedchemist will not be included in the article because it is too specific for the scope of this article which strives to generally show what synergetic catalysts are, and generally what they can achieve. The article recommended is a review of bimetallic nanoparticles and how the combinations of metals allows for synergistic catalysis of various reactions. While important, it would deserve its own article rather than a stub in this article. As a whole, that area of synergistic catalysis is markedly different from what is described herein.

4. The format of the citations was left as is as this is how Wikipedia templates it.

--Tiraxxis (talk) 04:58, 11 November 2013 (UTC) Tayrochemie (talk) 12:38, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

DYK Nomination

The DYK project (nominate) 00:05, 13 November 2013 (UTC)