Talk:RNA helicase

The contents of the RNA helicase page were merged into Helicase and it now redirects there. For the contribution history and old versions of the merged article please see its history.

This article was the subject of an educational assignment in 2014 Q1. Further details were available on the "Education Program:University of Michigan/Chem455 505 Special Topics in Biochemistry: Nucleic Acids Biochemistry (Fall 2014)" page, which is now unavailable on the wiki.

The RNA Helicase article on Wikipedia has one sentence explaining its function. We would like to expand on this topic to explain more about how this enzyme works in junction with other enzymes to accomplish replication and also RNA metabolism in general. The Wikipedia page about RNA Helicase does not provide any insight into why this enzyme unwinds RNA, and also does not mention any structural or mechanistic themes of this enzyme either. There has been research done about how RNA helicase works that we would like to integrate into this page. We would also like to give a brief outline of the applications and purpose of this enzyme, to give a better idea of why helicase is so important to RNA metabolism. One article that would be useful for us to expand on this topic is: RNA helicases at work: binding and rearranging. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Lfarhat/sandbox&action=edit&preload=Template%3AUser_sandbox%2Fpreload&editintro=Template%3AUser_sandbox&redlink=1 Lfarhat (talk)

Content

I thought you did a great job of explaining things simply for people like me, who wouldn't know too much about this subject except for what has been taught in basic biology courses. The length of each section is nice and is easy to follow. The main thing, however, is the lack of terms/concepts linked to other Wikipedia pages. I'm not quite sure how viable this is for the first two sections, but for the last section (Diseases Related to RNA Helicase), I felt there were a few links that could be made - a minor thing, but important for Wikipedia. Also, just from reading a few of the references, a large aspect seems to be the nine conserved motifs within the RNA helicase families. This could very easily be its own section and be expanded upon.

Figures

The figure, unfortunately, is not available, but from the caption, is exactly the kind of figure needed in this section. Just make sure to cite! A good reference could be this site if you are having trouble:

. It would be nice, however, if you could also introduce a picture of the other 4 superfamilies (SF3-6) and maybe even a picture of the mutated or dysfunctional RNA helicases during disease. While not necessarily a figure, I feel like this would also be a good opportunity for an external link to a video of any of these processes described within the article.

References

There are more than 10 references and there are non-journal sources as well, however, some sources towards the bottom of the list seem incomplete if they are journal references (doi, etc.).

Overall Presentation

This is a really good draft, and it is easy to follow, which is most important to me in my eyes. Just a few small things, like fixing the citations of the image, or uploading more images and expanding on the current information in the sections. Links to other Wikipedia pages should also be added. Besides that, I thought this was a really well done draft and there shouldn't be any major changes to this page.

Sfkuo (talk) 16:51, 22 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Your article had a clear layout, consisting of an introduction and three aspects about RNA helicase. Each section was about a paragraph in length and the content justified the length. The introduction was organized in a non-specific to specific content layout, beginning with what helicase is in general and then specifying what RNA helicase is. With Wikipedia articles, I think it would be best to start the introduction with what RNA helicase is though.

The first aspect of RNA helicase were the superfamilies categorized based on the ability to form structures.The six families were clearly compared and contrasted. The figure of SF 1 and 2 is not viewable though and needs to be corrected. From the caption though, it seems that this figure would help visualize the difference between two of the superfamilies. The second aspect of RNA helicase were the unwinding mechanisms of RNA helicase. Because there is little information known about the mechanism, a visual about the mechanisms that are known could help add more depth to the article. The third aspect about RNA helicase related diseases was great, because it helped to tie it back into something relevant for non-experts.

Overall, I think this is a great draft. The clear division between topics helped me process everything. The references are complete and include both journal and non-journal sources, which adds more variety to the article. I do have some suggestions for improvements though. The article uses many terms that I’m not familiar with, such as bacterial rho, canonical duplex unwinding, and DEAD-box helicase. It would be helpful to the reader to include links to their respective Wikipedia pages. Also, fixing the Figure 1 and possibly adding more content or another figure to the second section would help non-experts gain a better understanding.

Aduong626 (talk) 11:26, 23 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Good work. Please address issues mentioned by other reviewers above. I have a few other suggestions here.

1. Looks like you are having issues with uploading an image to the page. I see that your syntax are OK but just could not find the images you refer to on the Wikimedia Commons site. Besides the picture tutorial page mentioned by the other reviewer, you can also watch the video tutorial below. Please also make sure you have the right to post the image. An image directly form a publication is protected by copyright of the publisher and it's unlikely you can upload it here. Please let me know if you need additional help.

2. You did not have many internal links to other Wikipedia articles for terms and jargon in your addition. e.g. superfamilies, eukaryotes ... Please add some internal links as you can.You can do that with the syntax [[Eukaryote | eukaryotes]]

Hope it helps. Please let me know if you have any questions. ChemLibrarian (talk) 18:31, 27 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Lfarhat,

Thank you for your addition to the page. Please take into consideration the above comments when finalizing your page. Great job!

Elizabeth — Preceding unsigned comment added by ChemStudent24601 (talk • contribs) 18:02, 28 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you all for your feedback! It was all very helpful. We took all of your suggestions into consideration and will hopefully be able to improve our page. Adding external links is something that we were completely missing but after adding them into the article the entire Wikipedia entry is more complete and adheres to a wider audience that will be able to research unfamiliar terms further.

A major difficulty that we ran into while completing the draft was uploading a picture onto our Wikipedia entry. When considering an image to upload, we had to take into consideration the legality and copyright regulations. We decided to upload a picture that we generated from PyMol as opposed to finding one from another source in order to ensure that plagiarism was not an issue. Many of the suggestions that we received had to do with our image uploading so we mainly worked on finding suitable images to support our article. Hopefully after addressing these issues our entry is more complete and comprehensible!!

-Linda and Zeze

Zeze bazzi (talk) 02:06, 4 November 2014 (UTC) Lfarhat (talk) 04:08, 4 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Propose merge to Helicase. RNA helicase is said to be possibly identical to DNA helicase [1] and DNA helicase redirects to Helicase. A redirect was reverted some years ago.--Iztwoz (talk) 09:17, 30 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]