User:Scsol/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Lentiviral vector in gene therapy - Wikipedia

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
(Briefly explain why you chose it, why it matters, and what your preliminary impression of it was.)

First off, I work with lentiviruses at my job, so I have a personal interest in lentiviruses. Second, I think using lentiviruses is a very unexplored but innovative method for gene therapy. Most cells, like neurons, are in a non-dividing state. That is, they don't go through cell division very often, if at all, once they develop. This has become an issue with using retroviruses as gene therapy vectors as they cannot penetrate nuclear membranes. The nuclear envelope breaks apart during mitosis, giving retroviruses an open window to act on a cell. However, lentiviruses are an exception to this. Lentiviruses are able to penetrate the nuclear envelope and infect cells regardless of if they are dividing or not. This makes lentiviruses one of the most effective methods at gene therapy in cells that are typically non-dividing, such as neurons.

My impression is that it is a decent article. It gives a brief summary of lentiviruses and provides plenty of examples of the applications of lenitviral gene therapy.

Evaluate the article
Lead Section

There is an introductory sentence that gives a quick introduction to the topic. With the exception of the section of applications, there is a sentence that leads into the other sections of the article. While the topic itself is complex, the lead manages to get to the point and leaves details to their respective sections.

Content

The content is not up to date. The latest citation is from 2021 and deals with one of the applications of lentivrial gene therapy. The content dealing with the mechanisms of gene delivery are based on dated articles.

Tone and Balance

It does not appear to be biased towards any viewpoint in particular in the first few sections. The article does provide examples of applications of the topic. As the article is somewhat dated then it may be somewhat biased if there is enough work done on the topic where a multitude of examples can be given, giving the current applications better coverage than other more recent breakthroughs.

Sources and References

The article relies on dated sources. Out of the 14 citations and 3 sources for further reading, only 2 were written in the last ten years. Upon searching for the term "lentivirus gene therapy" on Google Scholar to find sources, more than 17,000 results came up from the past year alone. While not all 17,000 papers are exclusively about lentiviral gene therapy, it would still be safe to say that this is an active area of research, but the article does not reflect that by relying solely on information from prior decades.

Organization and Writing Quality

The article is organized fairly well and I could read it without any error. Although the article explains its points well, I would still recommend introducing lentiviruses and contrasting them with other retroviruses in the first section, and then discuss their use as gene vectors and then lead into discussing the mechanisms of lentiviruses in another section. This would highlight the importance of lentiviruses while providing an informative discussion on how they work.

Images and Media

Only one image is found in the article, that of the structure of HIV, a lentivirus. The caption is clear and adheres to copyright policies. However, I would recommend using another lentivirus as HIV is pathogenic and not a good example of a therapeutic virus. Or at least clarify that while HIV is pathogenic, its image is included for the sake of describing structures and features common to all lentiviruses.

Talk Page

The discussions behind the article are lacking. A short review was given in 2013 talking about how the reviewer liked the article but recommends more details, and the reviewer also added content into some of the applications. Another smaller and vague review came in 2020 simply stating the article was misleading and that the reviewer didn't understand it. It is a C-class rated article of low importance (of which I have to respectfully disagree with given its important and the large volume of ongoing research on the topic).

Overall impressions

I think the article is dated which overshadows the strength it has on concisely describing the topic as more research has been done on the topic that can provide better insight. I think the article can be improved by looking into more current research to reflect the last several years' worth of work done on it. Otherwise, this article is underdeveloped.