Topic Peer Review 2

Content

Overall your article seems well written and researched. There are a few things however that may need to be worked on a little more. Your intro is concise and gives a great description about what the main point of the article is. However the wording may be a little too technical. Your first sentence “RNA hydrolysis is a base-catalyzed reaction that breaks a phosphodiester bond in the sugar-phosphate backbone of RNA.” is great. I like that you linked phosphodiester, so people who don’t know what that linkage is can look it up, but when you mention the “sugar-phosphate backbone” I feel like a casual reader would get confused. It’s a little too technical. I would adjust the wording in the opening to be less technical. You can provide a more detailed description in the body of the wiki article.

The mechanism section is nice and concise as well. It provides a solid detailed description of what is occurring during hydrolysis with out being overly technical or using to many extraneous details. The only problem with this section is with the figure, which I talk about below.

The auto-hydrolysis section is a little confusing to me. I have been under the impression that the auto-hydrolysis and the RNA hydrolysis described in the mechanism section are the same process. It seems a little odd to repeat some of the same facts in this section. I think it would make more sense to change the content of this section slightly. I would focus more on the conditions where the autocatalysis is more likely. Focus more on the base catalysis. A figure may be helpful in understanding how basic conditions make the environment more conducive to self-cleavage. However the image of the RNA hydrolysis mechanism is more important.

The enzyme cleavage section is well written but could be expanded on in a few parts. One question that I had after reading the section is why double stranded RNA less likely to self-hydrolyze. Is the double stranded structure more stable? If you could find any articles or readings about that, I think it would be very helpful to explain that in this article. (I tried a little but had some trouble finding anything useful) I think it would also be useful to see a picture of the RNase A mechanism. You describe it really well, but figures are always really helpful when it comes to mechanisms. Again, I know only one figure is required, so I still feel the first figure (showing RNA hydrolysis) is the most important.

The final section on clinical and laboratory applications is really important and gives us a good background on how the concept of RNA hydrolysis can and is being used today. I think it would be really helpful to include an example of RNA specific cleavage with a ribozyme. I know in the Nature Medicine article by Thompson mentions using hammerhead Ribozymes to prevent the expression of a ras oncogene. That would be a great example to show how hydrolysis can be directed and used to treat people.

As for the term linking, I think you did a great job at linking all the more complicated terms to their respective pages. This will be very helpful very helpful for all the non-experts visiting the page. All the terms I was unfamiliar with were linked to and this helped me understand the article better. I could not find any article that had this information. This seems to be unique article. Nith117 (talk)

Figures

I saw that you did link to a figure in the article, however I could no see the image or click on it. There may have been a problem when it was uploaded to the page. Based on your description, I assume it shows the auto-hydrolysis of the RNA in the presence of a base. I think that would be a great image to use. It will help people with less background in biology better understand this hydrolysis process. I think one other image that would be helpful is showing the difference between ribose and deoxyribose. A regular person may not fully understand the difference based on what is said, so that would be really helpful. Nith117 (talk)

References

You have multiple resources and use a wide variety of source types. Textbooks and journal articles are cited. Your journal articles are also from higher tiered journals (Science and Nature), which makes them more trusted articles that have gone through a more strenuous review process. However you introduce a few concepts without citing the idea immediately. You tend to cite at the end of a paragraph, but you should cite after every new idea that is presented. (The RNase A paragraph is a good example. Three sentences are written detailing the mechanism, but only the last sentence is cited. I think you need to cite each sentence)Nith117 (talk)

Conclusion

I believe that you did a great job explaining the more difficult topics in this section and provided the appropriate technical information for this concept. Your page is formatted really well and has a good basic organization. However, I do feel like you can elaborate more on most of the topics. Most of the secondary sections could be extrapolated on a little more and could use a few more examples to better illustrate the topics. Besides this, you need to fix the figure to make it appear in the article and cite your ideas a little more often. Good Job on the article and I look forward to reading the final product on Wikipedia. Nith117 (talk)

GSI Comments

Thank you for your addition to Wikipedia. When finalizing your page, take into consideration the comments from the peer review.

Overall it looks good! I think with a few edits you'll have an excellent page.

Elizabeth