User:WeepingBritney/Enzyme inhibitor prof review

I.Quality as a teaching aid
a.Level appropriate? Yes

b.Logical sequence? It’s O.K. but not great. I certainly would have done things differently.

i.I would not have “uncompetitive” under the “special” category. It is special and unusual, but it is easy to see with the math and figures and it helps get the points across.

ii.I would include mixed and non-competitive inhibitors together, with non-competitive being a special case of mixed, or alternatively with mixed being a complex case of non-competitive.

c.Would you recommend this article to my undergraduates? No. See comments below.

II.Quality as summary of the topic
a.Does the article cover the topic completely? Not very well. For example, overall it does a fairly poor job with the kinetics. (Although some may say that they kinetics are sometimes over-emphasized, so I guess that point is a bit debatable.)

b.Are the basic concepts introduced? Yes.

c.Is the amount of detail appropriate? No. See comment above with kinetics. Also, there is too much emphasis on examples at the expense of the main concept. Examples are great and help students see the importance of a topic, but they shouldn’t get in the way of presenting the main topic.

d.Are there any errors, omissions, and/or misleading statements? Yes – see my comments above about the types of inhibition.

e.How precise and/or quantitative is the article? Not very much in my opinion. For instance, when describing the types of inhibition, the authors do not make very good use of equations that will help the student understand why certain graphs look the way they do. Along those same lines, they describe the type of inhibition in words, but they do not explain how that affects the various kinetic parameters. In short, this article is basically qualitative.

f.Up-to-date? I guess so for a qualitative explanation of inhibitors.

g.Historical development? N/A

III.Readability
a.Clear and well-organized? See my comments on logical flow.

b.Good flow? No. See my comments above on the over-emphasis on examples.

c.Redundant. Introduction is redundant to other areas in the text, but I don’t mind that for the introduction.

IV.Figures
a.Clear? The figures are basically correct, but they are not used effectively as a teaching tool. They are either “pretty pictures” (which is fine occasionally) or else they are good, but the authors miss the opportunity to use them as a good teaching tool.

b.Consistent? Sometimes the text says “to the left,” but really the figure is in the middle on the preceding page. Perhaps this is more of a problem with printing it out and that it looks fine on a computer screen. However, probably 9 out of 10 people will print it out to read it completely.

c.Exceptional figures? No.

V.References
a.Thoroughly referenced? O.K.

b.Age? O.K.  Many are within the last 10 years. And let’s face it, this field really hasn’t changed in the last 25-30 years.

c.Reliable sources? Most seem to be.

VI.Other comments
a.It would help if new terms were in bold and the definition somehow stood out.

b.The introduction was pretty general, but that’s probably O.K. When I first read it, however, I didn’t realize that they were going to be going into more specifics on these points later. Thus, I was a bit disappointed with the lack of detail. They should have made it clear that this was an overview at the beginning, perhaps by labeling it as such.

c.Overall I found the kinetics to be pretty weak and lacking (which is a major aspect of enzyme inhibitors). I would not recommend people to read it for that reason alone – although there are also the other reasons listed above.

d.No real discussion on using non-linear fits, which is what basically everyone does nowadays.

e.No tidbits of information on how to ensure that you make a double-reciprocal plot and which parameters will be the most accurate and which will have the biggest errors.

f.The authors fell into the muddy middle between qualitative and quantitative. Either is O.K. in the correct context (although for a “majors-level” course it should be quantitative). It was definitely not particularly quantitative in many aspects, but in other aspects it was far more quantitative than it needed to be if it were only to be used as a qualitative source. Thus, it really isn’t appropriate for either application.