User talk:AChemE12/sandbox

(Article under construction by undergraduate students for a Introduction to BioEngineering Class at the University of Maryland. Please only add constructive material with citations. Thank You. )

advice
It helps to have some content. Please also consider to what extent this material is covered by other Wikipedia articles, and what the proper title should be: I think you are likely to mean, We already have an article Point Mutation. It could use considerable expansion and referencing--it would be more helpful if you would add to it rather than start another. If you decide to do that,  the most practical thing to do, is to ask for removal of the present empty page   by placing at the top a line reading db-author : this page will be removed & you can work on the existing one.

Please check our page School and university projects for some information on how to do such an assignment. I will be glad to assist further--just contact me on my user page or email me from the link there, which will work if you have set up email in your user preferences. I have both considerable experience as an Administrator here, and a PhD in molecular biology.  DGG ( talk ) 06:51, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

Project Peer Review Group 9
This article details point mutations, which are the singular instance of a change or mutation in a piece of genetic material, or DNA. This often occurs during DNA replication though can occur for other reasons and can have very widespread effects on the cell. Types of point mutations include deletions, translations, insertions, and transversions. Point mutations can be caused by UV light, free radicals, by bonds in DNA degrading, and replication errors. These mutations can be harmful in many ways but may also be beneficial and a necessary part of human life. For example point mutations are the root cause of the serious blood disorder sickle cell anemia, which can be life threatening and debilitating. However point mutations play a pivotal role in the theory of evolution as point mutations beneficial to an organism’s survival are more likely to occur than disadvantageous mutations, and these beneficial changes may be passed on.

Major Concerns

-The article seems to have many instances of repetition that could be cut out. Point mutations are defined on multiple occasions as genetic sequence changes at a specific point. It could be beneficial to try to regroup the sections of this article to eliminate redundancies. For example both the reason and causes section and the what is a point mutation section end with a discussion of how they can be both beneficial and harmful to an organism. It would probably be helpful just to create a separate section detailing this.

-The sentence structure and word choice of the article overall needs to be reevaluated to make it more cohesive and less choppy. For example “The mutation occurs most times in DNA replication.” Could be reworded to “Point mutations usually take place during DNA replication.”

-The history section of this article describes mostly the history of cell division and thus the DNA replication process. It however should also detail the history of point mutations, for example how they were first discovered or researched. How were deletions found to be different than translations? Etc.

-The final section on polymorphisms is rather confusing and does not tell the reader what a polymorphism really is. This section should be adjusted for clarity and detail.

-The what is a point mutation section of this article could use some adjustment and could perhaps be used to detail the differences between insertions, deletions, and translations, using the simplified example format that is used in this section for a translation. For example “The cat is in the bag” vs “The -at is in the bag” for a deletion. This could make the page more visitor friendly and easier to read.

Minor Concerns Some small errors and grammatical errors found

-The last sentence in the overview,” to find this information we used the …”should be removed and replaced with a citation of the Wikipedia point. That sentence detracts from the overview and is unnecessary

-The first sentence in History should be changed to “The cellular reproduction process…”

-“There are different short term and long term effects that come arise from mutations.” Remove come or arise both words aren’t necessary

-In reasons and causes the word the is repeated unnecessarily in the sentence “Also, the one of the cell metabolic byproducts,..”

-In the overview section the separation of one long sentence to two sentences to clarify may be helpful. “Changing one purine or pyrimidine will change the amino acid that the nucleotides code, changing this one amino acid will change the entire peptide, and therefore change the entire protein.”

-In the history section finding should be changed to found in the sentence “Hermann Fol continued Hertwig’s research by testing the effects of injecting several spermatozoa into an egg, and finding that the process did not work with more than one spermatozoa.[1]”

References References 1-4 were checked and all brought me to the source of the citation however there is no actual citation available for these sources. Additionally I checked source 6 which seemed to be complete and had a fully functional link to the cited source. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jfrey12 (talk • contribs) 03:26, 12 April 2011 (UTC)

Team 15's Peer Review of Team 8
Summary

Team 8's topic is Cellular Reproduction and DNA Replication: Point Mutation. Their article focuses on point mutations’ role in the alteration of genes. In addition, Team 8 provides background information on the discovery of point mutations and the causes and effects of the point mutations. They connect their topic to the theory of evolution by explaining the role point mutations have on an organism's likelihood of survival and reproduction.

Major Concerns

One major concern with this article is that the title does not match the content of the Wikipedia page. The title at the moment is User:AChemE12/sandbox. This prevents the reader from quickly understanding that the wiki is about point mutations. In order to find the page, the link on the discussion board had to be used. This prevents users from easily finding the Wikipedia page. Another major concern is that Team 8’s Wikipedia page has no links to other Wikipedia pages. This is a huge setback because one of the driving forces of the Wikipedia Project was the networking of pages to each other. Links enable Wikipedia authors to utilize the work of others, and this helps authors write only the necessary information on their page while letting other users fill in the gaps of knowledge. At this time, there is no easy way to find this Wikipedia page, and a user probably would not even click a link to this page due to the uninformative title. The overview section also is a major concern. It is misleading and contains a few incorrect statements For example, “A single point mutation can change the whole DNA sequence” is an inaccurate statement. A point mutation may not change a DNA sequence because there are multiple codons that code for the same amino acid. For instance, a nucleotide could be changed to a different nucleotide which would lead to a codon sequence that still codes for the correct amino acid. Also, the overview section needs to be corrected for grammar. A codon section would be useful for readers. Codons play an important role in the gene to protein process. Since point mutations directly affect codons, a section describing the relationship between point mutations and codons should be included in the Wikipedia article. A section explaining the effect that point mutations have on a proteins structure and function would also be useful. In the section What is a Point Mutation Team 8 could use some more examples. There are many different contexts in which a mutation could occur including the same amino acid being coded for, a different amino acid being coded for, or a premature stop signal. All three of these situations should be given an explanation. Overall too many sentences to count should be rewritten because they are too simple. Compound and complex sentences would make create an easier reading experience.

Minor Concerns

The article also contained some minor issues relating to formatting. The box under the “Examples” section is the correct size of the page, while the sentence is only half inside it causing the page to be twice as wide as it should be. The Overview and Reasons and Causes sections should be proofread for grammar. The Overview is awkward to read at times even though it is simply written. The sentence “Changing one purine...change the entire protein” is poorly structured and the wording makes it redundant. The example provide in the “What is a Point Mutation” section could be a little misleading to readers who do not fully understand the concept. Team 8 should organize it differently by using only the 4 nucleotides, arrange them into codons, and even show the amino acids they code for.

References

The Citations section is in order except for numbers 1-4. Proper citation are needed. Currently, there is only a symbol for what type of file is contained by the link. There is no need for the in-text citation of Alberts, Bruce under the What is a Point Mutation section. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Zrom (talk • contribs) 07:28, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

Team 15's Second Peer Review of Team 8
Team 8 did a good job in editing their article in response to the comments made in the first review. The best edit was in the writing quality of each section where the grammatical errors were minimized and the paragraphs in each section read more easily. The level of writing is now at a comfortable reading level for Wikipedia readers who do not have any experience with point mutations. Team 8 also effectively added links to their document allowing readers to look up terms or processes that they were previously unclear about. For example, Team 8 has now linked words such as glycine, codon, DNA, etc. Team 8 added more scholarly references to their article; however they have a broken reference link that needs the tag. Additionally, Team 8 still needs to update their title so that readers can search for their article and so that they understand what the article is about before reading it. Lastly, Team 8 still needs to fix their Wikipedia formatting. Under the examples tab about hemoglobin there is a Wikipedia formatting error. For the first 4 citations under the references, they are still improperly cited because there are still no links added on for the websites or pdf files. Zrom (talk) 03:11, 3 May 2011 (UTC) Syao92 (talk) 22:59, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

Group 9 second peer review of group 8
Group 9 second peer review of group 8

Group 8 did a good job of reducing many of the redundancies that were detailed in the first peer review. This elimination of repetition makes the article much clearer and more concise. However, there are a few instances of repetition that have since arisen or have been missed. Sickle cell anemia is used as an example in different sections, which should be combined or one of which should be eliminated. Also the “Single Nucleotide Polymorphism” section contains repetitions within itself and still clearly needs to be adjusted. Perhaps the section would be better of split up into other parts of the article. Another place where this group has seemed to do a good job editing is in their attempts to eliminate their choppy sentence structure and clarification some of the smaller concerns. The group did a good job of reorganizing their “What is a point mutations” section, and the subsections on types of point mutations was a nice addition. On a few instances group 8 did not follow the edits we had suggested. One piece of advice they did not follow when mating their adjustments was the suggestion to detail the history of point mutations in the "history" section rather than simply the history of DNA replication and translation. Additionally there are some minor concerns that have not been adjusted.

Minor concerns that have not been fixed. -In the overview section the separation of one long sentence to two sentences to clarify may be helpful. “Changing one purine or pyrimidine will change the amino acid that the nucleotides code, changing this one amino acid will change the entire peptide, and therefore change the entire protein.”

-In the history section finding should be changed to found in the sentence “Hermann Fol continued Hertwig’s research by testing the effects of injecting several spermatozoa into an egg, and finding that the process did not work with more than one spermatozoa.[1]” Jfrey12 (talk) 22:44, 3 May 2011 (UTC)