Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Molecular Biology

Hi! Anybody willing to join? We need at least 10 people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Council#Proposing_a_new_WikiProject_Astrobiology Astropedian

Hello experts (hopefully!). Just before I put {{distinguish}} hatnotes on the articles, could you please confirm my assumption that Oligodendrocyte-myelin glycoprotein is not the same as Myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein. Thanks, and please ping me in any reply. Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 15:32, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

Not sure if you got an answer to this, but they are indeed separate. Uniprot pages for OMGP and MOG actually both state this, funnily enough:

Do not confuse oligodendrocyte-myelin glycoprotein (OMG) with myelin-oligodendrocyte glycoprotein (MOG).

Uniprot is a good reference if you run into stuff like this in the future. Common mixups/synonyms are generally included there in curated notes. Mausfield (talk) 23:31, 4 July 2026 (UTC)

Please add reliable sources where tagged. Thank you in advance. Bearian (talk) 03:09, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

You are an experienced Wikipedia editor and a biology teacher. Add them yourself if you think they are really necessary. (They aren't.) Genome42 (talk) 14:32, 23 May 2026 (UTC)

This article is quite marginal, but I am also concerned about the viability of the topic overall. The recent literature (since ~1990) appears limited and sporadic, and I am cautious about its quality. This might be a WP:TNT in my opinion. Dbsseven (talk) 15:27, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

Following up. I've nominated it for deletion under WP:TNT.Dbsseven (talk) 23:24, 12 June 2026 (UTC)

I proposed to to make Category:Ion channels a sub-category of Category:Membrane channels. Kindly, share your opinion at Category talk:Ion channels#Make this category a subcategory of Membrane channels.

Ion Soggo (talk) 02:19, 12 June 2026 (UTC)

What's the purpose of having categories and subcategories? I've been editing Wikipedia for twenty years and I've never used them. Sounds like a "make work" project to me.

There are far more important things to do. Genome42 (talk) 21:46, 14 June 2026 (UTC)

@Genome42: I totally agree there are more important things to improve in the Wikipedia articles. Still, categories seem very useful to me. They help me find related articles, and they bring logical order and hierarchy to the body of knowledge. WP:CATEGORY explains this much better than I could. Since the categories are there, I believe it is good to maintain their hierarchical structure as intended in WP:SUBCAT. Best wishes. Ion Soggo (talk) 02:53, 19 June 2026 (UTC)

It took me a few minutes to find the categories on various pages and check out the lists in several categories and subcategories.

Looks completely useless to me. Genome42 (talk) 03:39, 19 June 2026 (UTC)

Does anyone have any opinion on Module talk:Infobox gene § Edit request 11 June 2026? If so, please comment there — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 18:24, 15 June 2026 (UTC)

Hello, I have significantly improved the draft for the geneticist Huang Shi with independent secondary sources. Could a reviewer from this project please take a quick look? Draft:Huang Shi Claudia Ulrich (talk) 09:40, 18 June 2026 (UTC)

I proposed to to make Category:Ionotropic receptors a subcategory of Category:Ion channels. Kindly, share your opinion at Category talk:Ionotropic receptors#Make this category a subcategory of Ion channels.

Ion Soggo (talk) 01:41, 20 June 2026 (UTC)

 You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:Biochemistry § CHNOPS and related redirects. —Myceteae‍🌈 (talk) 22:37, 25 June 2026 (UTC)

I proposed to make Category:Nucleic acids a subcategory of Category:Macromolecules. Kindly, share your opinion at Category talk:Nucleic acids#Make this category a subcategory of Macromolecules.

Ion Soggo (talk) 18:59, 29 June 2026 (UTC)

Hallo aficionados and aficionadas of plant molecular biology!

The current article on phytochrome is, I'm afraid to say, awful - and I don't think it can be edited into shape. Consequently, I have written a completely new version to replace it. Please take a look....

One clear "issue" concerns the final section describing the history of phytochrome research: it's VERY long! One possibility would be to include it as a separate article, but I don't think that's really necessary. After all, no one has to read it if they're not interested (and there is a minimal "Discovery" section up front).

Best,

jon Photochrom (talk) 20:28, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

Hi. This section looks like a WP:COPYVIO from https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/gene/hlcs , but maybe MedlinePlus copied it from Wikipedia. Could someone knowledgeable check it out?

Thank you. — Itzcuauhtli11 (talk) 23:21, 14 July 2026 (UTC)

That section was created in 2005 in the initial publishing of the page and the Wayback Machine only started crawling the medline plus page in 2020--but maybe it is an old page that got moved to a new URL in 2020. ⇌ Synpath 00:09, 15 July 2026 (UTC)

My thoughts exactly. I also tried searching for the page in the Wayback Machine. — Itzcuauhtli11 (talk) 05:17, 15 July 2026 (UTC)

Hi everyone! I’ve been trying to clean up the structure of the gene pages (add redirects, infoboxes, etc…) but I ran into a bit of a tangle that I could use some assistance from someone who knows enzymes and/or wikidata better than I do. This has to do with the Gastric lipase, Lingual lipase page, and the corresponding wikidata pages.

What happened: When I tried to put in a gene infobox for gastric lipase, it was a bit broken because it linked to a “protein family” page instead of a gene. I have manually set the target of the gene infobox, so I think it’s ok for now, but the wikidata info seems to be a bit broken.

Wikidata issues: The LIPF gene wikidata page (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q18033040) says it encodes the “lingual lipase” protein (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q21120778), but as far as I can tell, this is due to a historic mix-up, and it should be “gastric lipase” (uniprot name: “Gastric triacylglycerol lipase”), but the closest page to that is (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q5526788) which is classified as a protein family.

My possibly incorrect understanding of the historical cause: from trying to track this down it appears that “lingual lipase” was an enzyme found in mice/rat saliva, but the human ortholog is LIPF/Gastric Lipase, which in humans (and maybe most other mammals?) is expressed in the stomach and not the mouth or saliva glands. Some early studies on human saliva found weak lipase activity, but those are hard to interpret since they were on cadavers. Currently it’s unclear if humans have a major saliva lipase, and if there is one, what its genetic identity is. You can see, for example, the rat LIPF uniprot page has “Lingual Lipase” as an alternate name (https://www.uniprot.org/uniprotkb/P04634/entry), but it’s not in the human one.<end possibly incorrect understanding>

How do we fix the wikidata (and wikipedia) pages: If I’m understanding the situation correctly, my intuition would be to turn gastric lipase from a family into a protein (unless there are other members) then set LIPF to say it encode it. Alternatively, we could turn “lingual lipase” into “gastric lipase”, and maybe make the lingual lipase AKAs specific to the rats/mice if that’s possible somehow? I tried to fix it, but I seemed to just be making a mess of things, so I reverted my changes.

Sorry for the long post but thank you in advance Pabnau (talk) 21:40, 29 July 2026 (UTC)

First: I have a COI. It is disclosed on my user page and on the talk page of the Jay Shendure article, which needs to be updated. The last significant edit was 12 years ago, which I think is 1000000 years in genetics/genomics (an overstatement), a field that I don't know a lot about (an understatement). At least not yet. Genetics has quickly become an obsession.

I posted an edit request on the talk page of the article yesterday, and I am hoping that an editor who knows genetics/genomics can take a look at it. It's just the intro and the infobox. I planned to break my requests down by section but I think that actually places more of a burden on reviewers. Is anyone able/willing to review the full article (when I finish it)? In addition to implementing edit requests, I am hoping to find someone who knows the field to correct/clarify/improve the draft. (jTo his immense credit, Jay Shendure has been completely hands-off.)

Thanks in advance. I'm psyched to have discovered this wikiproject. JSFarman2 (talk) 19:45, 3 August 2026 (UTC)

I have withdrawn the formal edit request. On reflection I realized that it's more time consuming for an editor to implement changes section by section, and will instead make one edit request via a sandbox draft. (I'm still hoping to find a willing editor with expertise in this area. Thanks, JSFarman2 (talk) 17:49, 5 August 2026 (UTC)

Hi folks, I've been trying to find a decent source or sources for the currently unreferenced Stable cell page. Problem is, I am starting to suspect this is not a real term, or at least one that is not frequently used in the literature.

My instinct is just to merge it to G0 phase, but wanted to check in here before doing so.

Thanks for any and all feedback you can provide! DuckWrangler97 (talk) 20:48, 14 August 2026 (UTC)

In book "The Molecular Biology of the Cell" by Alberts et al. (2022; ISBN 9780393884821) there is no concept of a "stable cell" in respect to mitosis.

I believe it would be good to delete article Stable cell, or make it a redirect to G0 phase.

Ion Soggo (talk) 03:47, 22 August 2026 (UTC)

Thank you for the reply. I am going to go ahead and redirect to G0 phase for the time being. DuckWrangler97 (talk) 14:39, 23 August 2026 (UTC)

I'm seeing these three articles:

• Glutamate dehydrogenase - infoboxes include "glutamate dehydrogenase [NAD(P)+]" and "glutamate dehydrogenase (NADP+)"

• Glutamate dehydrogenase (NADP+) - orphan article, not linked from anywhere

• Glutamate dehydrogenase (NAD(P)+) - only linked from List of EC numbers (EC 1)

It looks like the second two might be appropriate to merge into the first, but since I'm not familiar with this subject, I'll leave this to somebody else to determine. Dreamyshade (talk) 03:48, 17 August 2026 (UTC)

Hmm, I feel like a lot of the automatically constructed EC number pages have some issues, and page names tend to make it hard for people to find them. It looks like there are three EC designations involved, which are distinguished by their cofactors: EC 1.4.1.2 (NAD+), EC 1.4.1.3 (NAD+ or NADP+), and EC 1.4.1.4 (NADP+). The two human enzymes are the more permissive EC 1.4.1.3, while the other two seem to be found in bacteria and fungi.

EC 1.4.1.2 redirects to that first page, but it looks like its scope has engulfed the other two pages, which are supposed to correspond to the other two EC numbers. Personally, I think it would be reasonable to just merge them, unless the microbiologists out there want to give those two orphan pages some love Pabnau (talk) 19:48, 17 August 2026 (UTC)

For now, I've added some short clarifications to the orphan pages to help any lost souls who stumble onto them Pabnau (talk) 20:30, 17 August 2026 (UTC)

Hello, during the academic semester of Fall 2026, I will be using The Wikipedia Assignment to help teach my | Advanced Biochemistry Course. My interest stems from my own participation in editing Wikipedia for a college assignment many years ago. While I have been working on developing the assignment, I stumbled upon The Metabolic Pathways Taskforce which appears to have most of its activity around the same time of my college assignment and is now inactive. I would like to invite any individuals interested in reinvigorating this community to join me and my students as we work this semester to improve metabolism-related articles.

Be well, Kehrbykid (talk) 19:53, 17 August 2026 (UTC)

I think there are a lot of pathway and enzyme pages that need help, but a lot of issues I've seen are organizational: things like information duplication/scope creep or poor coordination between related gene/protein pages, enzyme type pages, and pathway pages. It also seems common for erroneous information to get added to pages due to confusing similarly named enzymes, or getting mixed up by differences between species.

So yeah...lots of places that can be improved, but also a lot pitfalls where it's easy for students to slip up and make mistakes. If I have time, I'll try to provide an extra pair of eyes to help catch errors Pabnau (talk) 05:00, 24 August 2026 (UTC)

I proposed to move two subsections to section "Disorders" in article Histamine. please share your thoughts at Talk:Histamine#Shall we move "Schizophrenia" and "Multiple sclerosis" to "Disorders"?

Ion Soggo (talk) 03:30, 22 August 2026 (UTC)

Nobody cares. The article is already far too complicated. Genome42 (talk) 14:56, 23 August 2026 (UTC)

Many articles refer to "key enzymes". In any process that they catalyze, enzymes are key, so that adjective is unnecessary. --Smokefoot (talk) 16:16, 22 August 2026 (UTC)

I think it's overused for sure, but I'm not sure I agree that it doesn't have value. Enzymes can be not "key" in a couple of ways.

There might be multiple, say, degradation pathways, and your enzyme is part of the less common one.

You might have two proteins which can catalyze the same reaction, but whose primary function is part of different pathways, but if one of them is faulty, the other might pick up some of the slack (eg: ARG1 vs. ARG2).

Alternatively, your enzyme might just speed up a tautomerization or other reaction that happens decently fast on its own (I think RIDA can do this as part of threonine/serine catabolism, though I haven't looked into it in depth). Pabnau (talk) 20:45, 22 August 2026 (UTC)

I have a declared conflict of interest on Focal molography, as I work for the company that commercializes the technique, so I do not edit the article itself. This project is tagged on its talk page, hence this note.

There is an open {{Edit COI}} request there with three mechanical copy-edits: restoring "molography" in the lead, where an automated typo tool replaced it with "holography" in July 2025, so the article currently states that holography allows quantification of molecular interactions in living cells; inserting a missing preposition in the Realization heading; and shortening the Applications heading per MOS:HEAD. No content, sourcing, or emphasis changes are involved.

Content additions from a larger request that I withdrew today will follow separately in small batches. Those will need subject-matter review rather than a copy-edit check, and input from editors familiar with label-free biosensing would be more useful there than my own wording. My full disclosure is on my user page. Gatterdam (talk) 10:37, 24 August 2026 (UTC)

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:CcdA/CcdB Type II Toxin-antitoxin system#Requested move 19 August 2026 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. -- Maddy from Celeste (WAVEDASH) 19:07, 26 August 2026 (UTC)