User:Psm872/Week 4 Priya M

Lead
Wikipedia Article: DNMT1

Article body
Proposal 1: Add more information to the introduction paragraph.

The current description is a little bare-bones, and in my opinion, doesn’t give you enough information about the methyltransferase. Specifically, I think there should be a statement or two with the beginning “DNMT1 has been implicated in _______.” I believe there should also be a couple statements that mention if there is a DNMT1 homolog in other organisms and if so, what name it goes by.

Proposal 2: Short summaries for the “Interactions” body paragraph explaining each interaction in slight detail.

A list of 7 genes is mentioned as evidence of DNMT1’s interactions, but no other information is given. I totally understand that each one is hyperlinked, but even once you click on the other gene’s page there’s no information as to the specific nature and effect of the interaction. The only way to get this information is to go to the references.

For example, I would include “When DNMT1 binds to DMAP1, the resulting complex has been found to repress transcription”. A few more sentences could be added as well, but the point is that I think short descriptions of each interaction will help the reader get some real information from this Wikipedia page.

Proposal 3: Add definitions of certain acronyms.

UHRF1, PCNA and the other genes should have acronyms.

Proposal 4: Add section “Implications with Cancer”

A brief search on PubMed showed me that there is a significant amount of review literature concerning the use of DNMT1 as epigenetic footprints for cancer. In this review, there’s evidence shown that extremely low frequency electromagnetic field (ELF-EMF) can be used to detect epigenetic factors such as DNMT1 in certain tissues. There is an additional review article that discusses the orthopedic implications of epigenetic changes during carcinogenesis that I believe would further the reader’s understanding of how DNMT1 is viewed from a research/clinical perspective.

Lastly, I found a third review article explaining how DNMT1 is implicated as a cause of triple-negative breast (TNBC) cancer. DNMT1 overexpression is show to exist in breast cancer patients and causes a decrease in breast cancer survival via 4 functions that are listed in the abstract.

Free to a new home
The first of these articles is called “Genomic Imprinting” and discusses the phenomenon where the transcription of a gene depends on whether it came from the mother or father. I found this article to be well-organized for the most part, and I also believed that it included relevant details to the topic. In evaluating the article, I could easily identify the main idea, which got the reading off to a good start. Next, most of the points included in the first couple paragraphs were explored in the rest of article; one suggestion I had off the bat was to allude to the order of the story being told, and not skipping sections, in the first section. This could include mentioning that there would be a discussion of non-mammalian imprinting. In general, the article was well-balanced and there didn’t appear to be a tone skew from my personal readings. Although I couldn’t check every source to make sure it was reliable, every claim I checked appeared to have a reference associated with it. Lastly the only discussion I noticed on the talk page was an issue with semantics of a sentence in the intro. I believe this issue can be fixed very easily with the support of a resource. So, to edit the article, I noticed a knowledge gap in the section “Imprinted genes in other animals.” This section was dedicated to outlining some of the specific findings regarding how imprinting may work in non-human animals. There was no mention of c. elegans and the research that has been conducted to understand how imprinting may work. In this(https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-06236-8) article, it is unexpectedly found that in c. elegans sperm there is histone-based epigenetic memory for both spermatogenesis and oogenesis. This finding further develops our understanding of paternal imprinting which is already limited. I believe this is a necessary development to include in this section.

The second article is called “Pharmacoepigenetics” which is an article that I believe has significantly more issues. For starters, there’s no introduction paragraph, which leaves the reader completely blind in regard to the direction of the article; in fact, we are immediately thrown into the background of the topic. Second, there is a severe lack of sources: sometimes 1 or 2 per paragraph. However, I am leaning more towards this article because there is almost no mention of how epigenetics influences drug tolerance. This article(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2020501/) discusses the role of ion channel genes and how they are transcribed under epigenetic control as an adaptive mechanism to restore neural excitability. I believe a mention of this is quite necessary to an article that discusses drugs and epigenetics.