Talk:Helicase

Untitled
It should be noted that there are RNA helicases that unwind RNA duplexes and also rearrange RNA-protein complexes.

''E. coli contains 12 different helicases and some of them are not donut shaped. These non-hexameric helicases such as Rep and UvrD have been proposed to function as monomer or dimer. There is no direct evidence that any of the bacterial helicases can unwind DNA as a monomer.''

This is interesting too. Plz, modify it so it doesn't look like a comment. Also add some info about the other 11 helicases. -- Boris 16:16, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Looking for more detail on actual function of human DNA helicase
The article doesn't include much information on the actual mechanism of helicase, which I was hoping to find. I'm not familiar enough with WP rules about citable documentation -- is the article at this link adequate to quote from, because it does include some excellent notes about the actual nanomachinery: http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/02/unwinding_the_d_1069371.html

174.65.10.224 (talk) 14:57, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

Does helicase move along or drag DNA through?
According to Mechanism of T7 Primase/Helicase, "The helicase domain unwinds DNA by shuttling the 3'-end of the duplex DNA away from the molecule by pulling the 5'-strand through the enzyme." The animation is fascinating. 121.208.180.204 07:39, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
 * That's a good question, although the answer is quite logical. Helicase is to DNA like human is to earth. Imagine yourself walking the earth, does the earth spin because of your movement? The mass of a DNA strand is so enormous compared to the mass of a helicase molecule that it should hardly move at all. Also, by taking real zippers into account, the "base pairs" hardly move when the zipper opens. So the answer should be that helicase moves along the double helix causing a minuscule movement of the helix Redtails (talk) 15:14, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
 * XPB is ATP dependent - I guess that the helicase uses ATP to move along the DNA molecule. To be honest it doesn't really make all that much difference anyway. Smartse (talk) 15:37, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

Helicase Jokes
I think we should consider adding a joke section and we could start with this joke: "If I were a protein, I would be helicase so I could unzip your genes." :P Rage italic 15:43, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

That joke used to be on this page, but it was removed. I don't feel it is relevant to this article. Amboo85 (talk) 07:12, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

To be fair, we could add a category entitled cultural references or something more wiki-fied and mention the fact that the protein's function is used as a pun? Just an idea. 2.125.169.54 (talk) 13:06, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

Enzyme or protein?
My "Molecular Cell Biology" text book calls it an enzyme and I was also told that in cell biology lectures. Is the book out of date?Smartse (talk) 16:50, 1 April 2009 (UTC)


 * I've changed it - the -ase suffix means they are enzymes and they were already categorised so at the bottom of the article. The references already listed say they are enzymes too. Smartse (talk) 11:50, 7 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Nearly all enzymes, apart from ribozymes, are proteins. Helicase is a protein, so your textbook is correct. Manfi (talk) 13:58, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

New section: Helicase disorders and diseases
I've added a new section for disorders caused by helicase mutations. So far I have completed sections on XPD point mutations and RecQ family mutations, working on a few more to add.Jennifergr (talk) 09:56, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

New sections: Helicase Discovery and Diagnostic Measurement Methodology
Hello all. I am going to add two new sections to this wikipedia article. Helicase discovery history and Diagnostic Tools for Measuring Helicase Activity. Please let me know if you have any questions/concerns. Jbaradei (talk) 20:02, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

Forgive me for the elementary question, can someone tell me how to make my references part of the reference list?Jbaradei (talk) 21:43, 12 November 2012 (UTC)
 * I found this useful: http://diberri.crabdance.com/cgi-bin/templatefiller/ - you can add the PMID number in, and if you select the box "add ref tag" it will already add the appropriate ref tags at the beginning and end for you. To repeat the same reference after you've already entered it once, make sure the first reference has a reference name (e.g. ) and use this code: with the same name as the original. Here is also a good resource to explain using the same reference more than once: Referencing for beginners - hope this helps, let me know if this doesn't make sense and I'll clarify! Jennifergr (talk) 22:42, 12 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Good answer, Jennifer, you beat me to it! (I used the   tag to fix up your answer a little bit.)  Another basic concept to keep in mind is that you don't add the references directly to the reference section.  You add them inline, right in the place in the article where they occur.  This creates a footnote in the article that takes you to the correct place in the references section.  I can walk through an example of this in the web conference at 8 this evening, if you guys are interested. Klortho (talk) 22:51, 12 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Thank you so much you two. I was trying to do this in a hectic environment a couple hours ago and just couldn't understand what I was doing. Now I do...thanks again!Jbaradei (talk) 23:42, 12 November 2012 (UTC)
 * So I added a couple parts to the new section. Feel free to review and revise but just know that it is still a work in progress. I have more assembled data to add, but this is all I had the time to add today.Jbaradei (talk) 23:50, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

Punctuation when using citations
Just a reminder that when adding references, unlike what we're used to in some writing styles, the Wikipedia Manual of Style states the reference tag should appear after all punctuation (including commas and periods/full stops), instead of before the period. You can also find this referenced in Wikipedia Referencing for Beginners. Jennifergr (talk) 23:51, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

Final week mini-review
Hi, guys. Here's a final-week mini-review of your page. It is just a few random notes, that I jotted down while skimming the page, and is not intended as a comprehensive review.


 * Your article could use more figures. Please see some suggestions here, under "Figures and Images".
 * What is a "fork junction"? Please introduce terms before you use them; and/or make them into intra-wikipedia links.
 * You have some stuff under "Function" that really belongs in the intro, I think. For example, "Approximately 1% of eukaryotic genes code for helicases" -- this has nothing to do with function.
 * Typo in 2nd para of "Function": "Helicases aWhereas".
 * In that same paragraph, could you describe how they act passively? For example, what does "waiting for uncatalyzed unwind" mean?
 * The parenthetical in "Active and passive helicases" is confusing:  "which can be evaluated by finding B > kbT ...".  I think what you mean is that the activation barrier is significant if B > kbT, but that's not how it reads.
 * Under "Structural features", you don't really talk about structural features. You mention sequence motifs, but there is a lot more about the enzyme's structure than that.  I think this section could be expanded.


 * Thanks for the review tips! The three of us have been looking desperately all semester for images we're able to use (due to copyrights), however we can't find any - we've looked at the tips and links on WIkipedia for images, and those specific to science-related subjects, are there any other suggestions of places to look? I'll review my section on Active/passive helicases - to me it actually reads appropriately for my intention, as I mean by finding (experimentally) B to be greater, but I can rewrite it in terms as you've suggested if it's coming across confusing. I added to Function, but did not go through to rewrite/edit the previous authors' sections and terms - I'll work on that this week before finishing up. The Structural Features section was not part of our proposed editing for the project - there were lots of sections needing added and work, so we tried to add a substantial amount of information, but I think we had felt tackling everything for editing would be more than we can handle in the semester - are we being graded on the topics/sections we did not identify for editing in the beginning? Thanks for the help and heads up!! Jennifergr (talk) 17:45, 9 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Also - there are areas in Function section that don't make sense to us either (that weren't written by us) and do have typos/missing words - I'm deleting these, as it's too difficult to know what the author was trying to explain. Later in the week I'll check their references and see if I can make sense out of it. Jennifergr (talk) 17:52, 9 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Regarding images, Image:DNA replication en.svg might be helpful as a general illustration. I have looked for more specific free images as well but can't find any. A simple diagram similar to this or this would be great and wouldn't take long to make in Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator. SmartSE (talk) 18:02, 9 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Hi, Jennifer, did you check the suggestions that I wrote here for finding figures? Wikimedia commons and/or the PMC open-access subset are your best bets, I think.  Regarding the various sections of the article:  this article is yours!  That means, the whole article.  Part of the "Wikipedia:Be Bold" policy is that you shouldn't be afraid to fix stuff that's been added by other editors.  If the section is light, and you feel that you don't have time to add material, don't worry about that too much.  But you should try to fix any serious problems, and also integrate those sections so that the "fit" within the content that you've added, and that the article as a whole has good flow. Klortho (talk) 18:21, 9 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the image SmartSE! I think we could incorporate this into the Function section. Klortho, I did check the Wikipedia resources you mentioned, I had been researching in Wikipedia previously in the semester for good links to images also, but nothing relevant to our article. It appears that sometime in the past week, someone (no user name, just IP address) made some edits in the Function section that may have been a mistake (like the deleting of some sentences) - I wasn't able to undo it since I had made other edits in the Function section, but didn't see all of this until your comments, so thanks again for the heads up. Jennifergr (talk) 20:12, 9 December 2012 (UTC)
 * The IP vandalised the article here and was not reverted, which is why the part you have removed made no sense. If the old version made sense, you can copy and paste from that link and replace the info in the article. SmartSE (talk) 20:36, 9 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the help with this SmartSE, I was hoping to find the link to the diff in revisions but wasn't getting there on my own - I just went through and found the diff link after clicking on the date of the nonsense revision to get that version - now hopefully I can take care of that on my own if I see this again - thanks so much for your help! Jennifergr (talk) 22:46, 9 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Yes, thanks much for the help SmartSE! Jennifer, vandalism is an occasional problem on Wikipedia, and I'm sorry I didn't notice it.  Your group should be getting notices of edits to this page, and if you ever notice an edit by someone you don't recognize, you should just do a quick check to make sure it is not vandalism.  Hopefully, you guys can continue to do this even after the semester is over, to make sure your hard work doesn't get corrupted.  Cheers! Klortho (talk) 23:32, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

Non-commercial images
Can you all please review WP:NONCOM? Some journals (as the ones you have been taking images from) are licenced under these terms but cannot be used here as content on Wikipedia can be used by anyone, for whatever purpose. SmartSE (talk) 18:31, 10 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Hi, Smartse. I think that actually a better reference for suitable licensing is on Wikimedia Commons, here.  I suggested to the class, here, that they find articles from Wikimedia Commons or from the PMC open-access subset.  If the latter, they should check the license to make sure it is suitable.  You are right that non-commercial licenses are no good, but CC-BY or CC-BY-SA should be okay, and I think most of the articles in PMC open access subset have one of those. Klortho (talk) 02:57, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Assessment comment
Substituted at 17:35, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

Proposed merge with RNA helicase
Both RNA and DNA helicases are possibly identical. DNA helicase already redirects to Helicase Iztwoz (talk) 09:21, 30 May 2016 (UTC) ✅

A Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion
The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion: Participate in the deletion discussion at the. —Community Tech bot (talk) 07:54, 14 May 2019 (UTC)
 * DNA replication en.svg

Wiki Education assignment: Molecular Genetics
— Assignment last updated by Jellyfish829 (talk) 11:29, 13 December 2023 (UTC)