Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Microbiology/Archive 13

Category merge proposal
A proposal to merge Category:Growth media to Category:Microbiological media is here for those interested. Thanks! Ajpolino (talk) 19:43, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

Potential merger of Qapqal disease & botulism
Hi, a new page was created today on Qapqal disease, a disease that, at first, was of unknown epidemiology but was later shown to be botulism. I started a discussion here proposing that Qapqal disease be incorporated into botulism, for those who would like to contribute. Enwebb (talk) 01:09, 30 January 2018 (UTC)

William R. Walton, Foraminifera researcher
I can't find secondary sources regarding William R. Walton. If anyone knowledgeable in foram research could provide some sources, all the better. --Animalparty! (talk) 23:44, 28 February 2018 (UTC)
 * That article appears to be lifted from his Scripps Institution of Oceanography obituary. I can't find the original issues of their newsletter online, but they've compiled all of their obituaries here (his is "Walton, William Ralph", page 88). I assume the text is under the institution's copyright? The obituary provides a nice overview of his life for an article, but I'm not sure if he meets any notability criteria. Hopefully someone else can find another source or two? Ajpolino (talk) 01:41, 1 March 2018 (UTC)


 * He wrote for example this book: Techniques for recognition of living foraminifera

https://books.google.be/books/about/Techniques_for_Recognition_of_Living_For.html?id=96G7GwAACAAJ&redir_esc=y Or check this: http://foraminifera.eu/ammonias.html, you can clearly see he contributed to the science of foraminifera

A link to a DAB page, and a puzzle
Dissimilatory nitrate reduction to ammonium links to the DAB page Sulfur bacteria. The two genera mentioned in the DNRA article, Beggiatoa and Thioploca, both reduce sulphide to sulphur. Both are in family Thiotrichaceae, order Thiotrichales and class Gammaproteobacteria. Of the two articles about sulphide-oxidising bacteria on that DAB page, purple sulfur bacteria are also in that class; but are in order Chromatiales. The Gammaproteobacteria article does not mention Thiotrichales or Thiotrichaceae. Those two thio- prefixes strongly suggest sulphur bacteria of some sort, but neither article says anything about metabolism. Can any expert help solve this puzzle? It looks to me as if information may be missing from Gammaproteobacteria at least, and that the DAB page is incomplete. Narky Blert (talk) 16:54, 8 March 2018 (UTC)

Draft:Gene Amplification in Paramecium tetraurelia
Any interest in rescuing this abandoned draft? Espresso Addict (talk) 01:23, 9 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately, I doubt it. That draft is a very small bit of very specific information (spread into quite a few words) on an organism we don't even have a page for. It's almost entirely just a summary of ref #3. Maybe a couple sentences of that would fit into a pawn-B article, but I doubt anyone will be interested in writing one just to get a sentence or two of that draft into the mainspace. Happy to be shown wrong by some interested rescuer. If not, thanks for bringing it by! Happy editing! Ajpolino (talk) 02:26, 9 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the prompt response. It was a bit of a long shot, but I hate seeing referenced content get deleted that might have some value,somewhere. Cheers, Espresso Addict (talk) 03:36, 9 April 2018 (UTC)
 * stupid question: why does it have to be deleted?Garnhami (talk) 18:20, 9 April 2018 (UTC)
 * It had been abandoned for a year, and consequently tagged for speedy deletion under criterion G13. BogHog has since cleaned it up a bit and moved it to mainspace. Hopefully someday someone expands it and/or gets some use out of it. So to answer your question, it doesn't have to be deleted. However (for better or for worse), old drafts are regularly deleted to help human reviewers comb through draft space for useful stuff. Cheers! Ajpolino (talk) 23:11, 9 April 2018 (UTC)

Type strain in infobox?
The taxobox system has a field type_strain. What should go in this field -- in particular, should it include culture collection deposition numbers? Straininfo.net lists the type strain for Methylophaga muralis as "Kr3 = NCIMB 13993 = VKM B-2303", and reports the type as "Strain Kr3 (5VKM B-23035 NCIMB 13993)". The original paper describing it (, under the name Methylophaga murata) writes "Type strain M. murata Kr3$T$ has been isolated from material scraped off the deteriorating part of a marble crypt in the Moscow Kremlin. The type strain is deposited in the All-Russia Collection of Microorganisms as VKM B-2303 and the National Collection of Industrial and Marine Bacteria as NCIMB 13993." I had initially included all three identifiers in the infobox, following plenty of other articles like Pseudomonas fluorescens, Variovorax paradoxus, etc., i.e., including Kr3, NCIMB 13993, and VKM B-2303. Another editor removed all information about the type strain from the infobox, then after I added them back in (as they were removed with no explanation), removed NCIMB 13993, and VKM B-2303 leaving just Kr3. What info should go in this field? Thanks for any guidance. Umimmak (talk) 21:52, 4 May 2018‎ (UTC)

WikiProject collaboration notice from the Portals WikiProject
The reason I am contacting you is because there are one or more portals that fall under this subject, and the Portals WikiProject is currently undertaking a major drive to automate portals that may affect them.

Portals are being redesigned.

The new design features are being applied to existing portals.

At present, we are gearing up for a maintenance pass of portals in which the introduction section will be upgraded to no longer need a subpage. In place of static copied and pasted excerpts will be self-updating excerpts displayed through selective transclusion, using the template Transclude lead excerpt.

The discussion about this can be found here.

Maintainers of specific portals are encouraged to sign up as project members here, noting the portals they maintain, so that those portals are skipped by the maintenance pass. Currently, we are interested in upgrading neglected and abandoned portals. There will be opportunity for maintained portals to opt-in later, or the portal maintainers can handle upgrading (the portals they maintain) personally at any time.

Background
On April 8th, 2018, an RfC ("Request for comment") proposal was made to eliminate all portals and the portal namespace. On April 17th, the Portals WikiProject was rebooted to handle the revitalization of the portal system. On May 12th, the RfC was closed with the result to keep portals, by a margin of about 2 to 1 in favor of keeping portals.

There's an article in the current edition of the Signpost interviewing project members about the RfC and the Portals WikiProject.

Since the reboot, the Portals WikiProject has been busy building tools and components to upgrade portals.

So far, 84 editors have joined.

If you would like to keep abreast of what is happening with portals, see the newsletter archive.

If you have any questions about what is happening with portals or the Portals WikiProject, please post them on the WikiProject's talk page.

Thank you. &mdash; The Transhumanist  10:59, 31 May 2018 (UTC)

Request for comment on recommending usage of automatic taxoboxes
There is an RfC regarding recommending usage of automatic taxoboxes at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Tree of Life. Inviting anybody who watches this page to contribute their thoughts to that thread.

WikiProject Microbiology is currently using automatic taxoboxes in 2.6% of project tagged articles that have any form of taxobox. Plantdrew (talk) 01:39, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

AFD Discussion - Modern Mars habitability
There is an article at AfD that may interest you. The article is here Modern Mars habitability. Please vote or comment at WP:Articles for deletion/Modern Mars habitability

Robert Walker (talk) 04:01, 18 August 2018 (UTC)

Bacteria 'described in' decadal categories submitted to CfD
@ Categories for discussion/Log/2018 October 8, per Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Tree of Life. ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf) 20:58, 8 October 2018 (UTC)

Archaea/Species/Fossil taxa/Taxa 'described in' decadal categories submitted to CfD
@ Categories for discussion/Log/2018 October 18, per Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Tree of Life. ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf) 16:01, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

WP:JOURNALS needs help
Most of the top-cited journals without articles on Wikipedia belong to bacteria/virus-related things. There are more than just the following (see WP:JCW/Missing1), but we've got
 * The NamesforLife Abstracts
 * www.straininfo.net
 * Bergey's Manual of Systematics of Archaea and Bacteria
 * Virus Research
 * Chromosoma
 * Current Microbiology

All of those are cited hundreds if not thousands of times. Help writing the journal articles (or website or whatever) would be greatly appreciated. We have a guide for that at WP:JWG, which means writing a solid journal article takes 20-30 minute. It's possible some of those don't warrant full articles, but could be sections in another article. E.g. maybe Bergey's Manual of Systematics of Archaea and Bacteria and Bergey's Manual of Systematic Bacteriology can be covered by the same article.

Thanks for any help you can give! Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:37, 14 November 2018 (UTC)