Wikiwand AI

Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Molecular Biology/Archive 2

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Archive 1Archive 2Archive 3Archive 4

Time for an overview?

Recently, a merger was made between the articles Prostaglandin-F synthase and Prostaglandin F synthase (a no-brainer as they clearly covered the same topic) by Reba16. I had noticed the proposal to merge and took an interest in the new article. This led me to discuss with Reba16 (see ) issues which are relevant to many articles on genes, enzymes and their reaction products. My perpective is that of an organic chemist but Reba16 (who is not) agreed with me. We now seek views from others and some guidance. I'll illustrate with specific examples but I suspect the problems are widespread.

  • Why is the reaction in the lede of Prostaglandin F synthase written as if it was an oxidation, not a reduction? This enzyme converts a ketone to an alcohol, or (if PGH2 to PGF2) breaks an O-O bond. Answer: the IUBMB Enzyme database (at EC 1.1.1.188) often gets this "wrong". See "METACYC database entry". for details: it confirms the known physiological direction of the reaction. The original Wikipedia article seems to have been generated in semi-automatic fashion from the EC database.
  • How does Prostaglandin F synthase differ from AKR1C3 for which there is another Wikipedia article, where some of the PDB id's are the same, for example 1RY0? Answer: one article is written to focus on the genetics, while the other focuses on the biochemistry but in fact they cover the same chemical reactions. (see "second METACYC database entry".).
  • Why does the article on Prostaglandin H2 not describe the synthesis of PGF2α as one of the reactions from PGH2? Indeed, the diagram in that article (File:Eicosanoid_synthesis.svg which is very widely used in Wikipedia) would give the reader the impression that PGF2α is not formed directly but only through PGE2, which chemically is odd since E2 is more oxidised than either H2 or F2α. Answer: the article is "correct" but misleading. There is a pathway from PGH2 to PGE2, EC 5.3.99.3 and from PGE2 to PGF2α EC 1.1.1.189 but the direct one-step process also occurs, namely EC 1.1.1.188.
  • Similarly, why does the article on Prostaglandin D2 not describe the synthesis of PGF2α from it? (Answer: no-one has written it yet.)

Conclusion: Many articles have been built up over the years without a sufficient overview. That seems to me to be one role Project Groups could usefully take.

    • I want to develop a proposal to handle these sorts of inconsistencies but before doing so it would be helpful to have comments from interested parties and (briefly!) other examples from non-prostaglandin pathways. Mike Turnbull (talk) 14:07, 24 March 2021 (UTC)
  1. I agree it was a mistake to give the reactions of our automatized enzyme texts any direction. In Wikidata the reaction participants get a qualifier "part of" ---> "left/right side of reaction" without implying which is preferred as input. Your example in Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q21105043#P527. Note we put the reaction on the activity item not the enzyme. Why? Because enzymes can have multiple activities. Note also we use the physiologically correct ions not the neutral compounds.
  2. articles like AKR1C3 are about genes, and the convention that such articles are named with the gene name is a good one. If you want to merge gene and protein, please separate these concepts in the new article as separate sections so they can be linked to.
Thanks. --SCIdude (talk) 16:30, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

Draft:SMIM19

Hey, this draft was submitted to AfC a few months ago: Draft:SMIM19. It's mostly greek to me, but I'm noticing that this protein is not the primary topic of any of the scientific sources listed. Should I accept or refuse this draft? Mottezen (talk) 07:01, 15 April 2021 (UTC)

This looks like primary bioinformatics research for the most part, which explains all the references to biological databases and online bioinfo tools. There are no secondary literature (or even primary research papers fitting the subject) in the references, so I think none of the references are usable. Actually there is nothing known about this except the sequence, and all you can say comes from bioinfo, so it's all hypothesis. --SCIdude (talk) 14:27, 15 April 2021 (UTC)
Thank you for your help. I just declined the draft. Mottezen (talk) 22:25, 15 April 2021 (UTC)
I've also added a belated comment to the draft. I agree with SCIdude that they've mixed in a load of original reserach in with the established information. It's a good example as to why we can't include that sort of primary research in the encyclopedia, as they've not stated their methodology for most of it and there are several significant flaws. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)talk 07:50, 16 April 2021 (UTC)
Now see, my impression was that genes like this one which is listed in NCBI are inherently notable and there are a lot of stubs of such genes. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 08:44, 16 April 2021 (UTC)
Wikipedia:No_original_research. --SCIdude (talk) 05:04, 18 April 2021 (UTC)
Not what I am talking about. I was only discussing the existence of such articles, not whether these tables are suitable content. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 09:06, 19 April 2021 (UTC)
You're both correct. Jo-Jo Eumerus is right that as human genes they're notable, so there should be articles on them. SCIdude is also right that they're peppered with high-risk original research that needs to be excised. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)talk 09:57, 19 April 2021 (UTC)
An alternative place for it would be an article that talks about all uncharacterized human proteins in general, maybe a list article. This needs a good reference, as well. --SCIdude (talk) 15:50, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

Draft:RNF227

I'd like the opinions of subject matter experts regarding whether Draft:RNF227, which has been languishing at Articles for creation for a few months, is a suitable topic for article space or not. When the same question was posed about another protein draft a couple threads ago, contributors were able to arrive at an answer quickly, so I hope this question isn't too burdensome. --Worldbruce (talk) 22:48, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

The draft ad the pages below have very similar issues with WP:original research in protein structure prediction and sometimes phylogenetics scattered amongst non-controversial info summarised out of databases:
Given the very similar activities of the editors who created these, I have to assume they're part of a well-meaning class (though I can't find the course organiser). T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)talk 03:20, 19 April 2021 (UTC)
This has been going on for quite a while, and due to the number, I suspect more than one University. While the subject is inherently notable, the problem with these bioinformatics exercises is that they are essentially WP:OR and therefore fundamentally in conflict with Wikipedia. Boghog (talk) 07:48, 19 April 2021 (UTC)
As per above, wouldn't this be a good start for a list article about uncharacterized proteins? --SCIdude (talk) 15:55, 19 April 2021 (UTC)
I've not got a good feel for how long such a list would be, but I wonder whether something more automated like a {{Wikidata list}} via User:ListeriaBot would work well. That way it'd encourage the info to be kept clean on and up-to-date on Wikidata. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)talk 23:42, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

Hi, not sure where the best place is to put this (since it affects multiple templates), but the RCSB PDB search API has been updated (and the old API discontinued) and therefore most (all?) templates that link to it for a search currently fail. On an initial glance this at least includes Template:Infobox protein family, Template:Infobox protein, Template:Infobox gene, Template:Infobox enzyme and probably many more. (See also another talk page comment on this here). I'd love to fix this myself but don't see myself having the time to anytime soon, anyone else willing and able to take that on? Thanks! coiledcoil (talk) 05:32, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

At least the PDBe and PDBj searches still work. However it is not trivial to fix the RCSB PDB links. According to the "Search by UniProt Accession" example, a search for P69905 returns this JSON data string. For {{infobox gene}} which is written in Lua, parsing the retuned JSON for the PDB accession numbers should be possible (however I don't know much about Lua). For the other templates like {{infobox enzyme}}, {{infobox protein}}, {{infobox protein family}}, {{infobox nonhuman protein}}, I don't even know where to begin. It may require rewriting the whole template in Lua. Perhaps we should just comment out the RCSB links for now. Boghog (talk) 06:43, 18 April 2021 (UTC)
After digging around some more, I figured out that one can write a URL to query and return a list of PDB accession codes, although the URL is very messy. For example, after stripping out the session ID:
but I am not certain these are persistent. This all seems very messy. Boghog (talk) 09:38, 18 April 2021 (UTC)
I don't think genes should have these links. And protein family should rather have a link to a human or model organism protein (which then links to PDB). --SCIdude (talk) 15:52, 19 April 2021 (UTC)
(edit conflict) What I meant by persistent is the link itself, not the target database. The target website (RCSB PBD) is continuously updated, and in fact, is where the bot via UniProt is getting the data. Now after stripping out the session ID, the links also appear to be persistent. My only remaining concern is how incredibly messy the links look in the template code. In Lua, this is not a problem since Lua has JSON html encoder function. But regular Wikipedia templates, as far as I know, do not. Boghog (talk) 16:11, 19 April 2021 (UTC)
{{Infobox gene}} template name is misleading. It encompasses both the gene and the protein encoded by that gene. So yes it should have a links to protein PDBs. A protein family is not limited to a single organism only related by primary sequence but also tertiary structure, therefore it is appropriate to have a link to a representative all PBDs from the family. Wikipedia ≠ Wikidata. Things are not so hierarchical in Wikipedia. Boghog (talk) 16:19, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

I tried to have a go at it, and yay, it works! I did my experiment on the Template:Infobox enzyme/sandbox (more useful link, the Template:Infobox enzyme/testcases). I coded the tentative Module:Sandbox/Bonob/RCBS PDB search with the idea that it could be used for other RCSB PDB searches by attribute. A number of remarks:

  • This is my first encounter with Lua and Scribunto, and I expect I haven't a great sense of conventions.
  • It's a fun approach, but that's just about preparing a complicated URL. Said URL can be reduced by a fair bit. I trimmed down the JSON object as much as I could, the ready-to-use URL is still long, but probably manageable with direct inclusion in the relevant templates (the two arguments that matter bolded):

https://www.rcsb.org/search?request=%7B%22request_options%22%3A%7B%22sort%22%3A%5B%7B%22sort_by%22%3A%22score%22%7D%5D%7D%2C%22return_type%22%3A%22entry%22%2C%22query%22%3A%7B%22type%22%3A%22terminal%22%2C%22service%22%3A%22text%22%2C%22parameters%22%3A%7B%22value%22%3A%222.7.1.153%22%2C%22attribute%22%3A%22rcsb_polymer_entity.rcsb_ec_lineage.id%22%2C%22operator%22%3A%22exact_match%22%7D%7D%7D

  • (Furthermore, we don't really need to escape the curly brackets, at least that's the impression I'm under, and that would make a tremendous change in readability. I'm assuming that this would not be clean clean though.)
  • To be fair, when a change is needed, manually dealing with the 'json-ifying' and the 'urlencoding-ing' is an absolute pain.. And as well for my reference since I keep getting lost in my tabs juggling with all that, a convenient URL encoder/decoder and JSON pretty printer (basically the first results in one's search engine of choice).
  • About the JSON object, the RCSB PDB help has a splendid tool to play around, here it is with the parameters I ended up with: Query editor (click on "Run Query").
  • Lastly, I've been wondering about this change of the RCSB PDB API. Their new API is powerful and clean, and it makes complete sense for its stated purpose, that is to be accessed by applications. It is also very well documented, but for a use case such as here, this doesn't make sense at all. I imagine others are in the same situation, other databases for example may want to embed links to specific searches to that database. On top of that, the documentation doesn't mention the web search service (from what I could find), hosted at www.rcsb.org/search, but only and explicitly enough the API endpoint search.rcsb.org/rcsbsearch/v1/query, which won't return a web search, but a formatted json output. They clearly use the same engine to power their web search tool, but I can't stop wondering if we're not missing something.
  • Oh, after lastly, but very importantly, this really is a tentative, say a proof of concept; if there's some interest, there would be much to do to get that in a publishable condition (and I'd be very happy to give my best try).. bonob (talk) 23:14, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
Thanks Bonob for implementing a module to create a functional RCSB PDB link. A very impressive accomplishment for your first try. The module appears fully functional and looks close to publishable to me. The new RCSB API is very powerful, but it is way more complicated to create simple queries. Your Lau module seems like a good solution. Cheers. Boghog (talk) 04:13, 1 May 2021 (UTC)

So indeed we were missing something, and I found, serendipitously really, that a search may simply be done using https://www.rcsb.org/search?q=, there is no need to go through the API. (The idea popped up to copy two sequences to test a Rosalind exercise I did recently, and looking for a sequence related to the first EC 1.1.1.1 I picked -- oh, alcohol dehydrogenase, this one's full of surprises -- I saw such a link syntax under my mouse pointer o.O)

I don't know that the syntax here is documented, but I experimented a bit, it uses the same keywords as the API (e.g. rcsb_polymer_entity.rcsb_ec_lineage.id), associates keys and values with colon, multiple values separated by comma (key1:val1,val2) and combines them with space separated uppercase operators (key1:val1 AND key2:val2 OR key3:val3).

I checked the 7 templates I found using this search, only the 3 listed by Boghog were concerned:

Thanks again Bonob for tracking down this alternative solution and for implementing it. As far as I can see, this syntax is not documented anywhere which made finding this solution way harder than it needed to be. Boghog (talk) 12:09, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

Ficain

One of your project's articles has been selected for improvement!

Draft:Fluorescent Chemosensors for Ion and Molecule Recognition

Request for Comment Robert Lanza

Microtubule Catastrophe and Rescue

Draft:Minimizer

Job sites for hiring scientists for industry R&D roles

ISCB Wikipedia Hackathon today

Physiological modulator

Discussion at WP:RSN concerning a paper about COVID origins and bioengineering

Merger discussion for PNPO

Portal:Biochemistry

Gene vs encoded-protein article guideline?

Status of Nirenberg and Matthaei experiment page

Y-DNA

AFD Drum RNA motif & hundreds of others

Computational and Statistical Genetics

Help to revive an inactive Wikiproject on Biophysics

Cyclol Featured article review

Disagreement at Talk:Artemisinin

Enzyme inhibitor FAR

meiogenesis?

Junk DNA

User script to detect unreliable sources

Draft:Antigenic Essence

Acute myeloid leukemia FAR

New computational biology workforce paper

Featured Article Save Award for Enzyme inhibitor

SME opinions requested at Talk:Intergenic region

Requested move at Talk:Hook effect#Requested move 4 September 2022

Eran Elhaik and Jewish genetics

Split Visual Cycle from Visual Phototransduction

Help with updating article

LoD considerations when an analyte is a tested with a matrix type that differs from the sample matrix

New article in need of attention from this project

Organ on a chip; MISLEADING (And for this reason inaccurate) INTRO; PLEASE CONSIDER MY SUGGESTION

Flavin / flavoprotein enzymes

Edit review requested

Good article reassessment for X-ray crystallography

Good article reassessment for Oligonucleotide synthesis

Good article reassessment for Amino acid

Good article reassessment for Antibody

Good article reassessment for Lipid

Time to clean up some old GAs

Frontiers on the reliable sources noticeboard

Hayflick limit article

Definition of a Gene

Junk DNA

Nitrate reductase

Old orphans

Chao1 index

PMID 1 cleanup

Good article reassessment for Aquaporin

Project-independent quality assessments

totally wrong history in this article

Move request notification

Asking for expert help

PKB and Akt1

Alkaline Phosphatase

Draft needs attention

Credibility bot

Articles for deletion/LeDock - molecular docking software designed for docking ligands with protein targets.

Expanding the list of human protein-coding genes

Article redlinks at Index of molecular biology articles

FAR for Proteasome

Requested move at Talk:Polyunsaturated fatty acid#Requested move 31 August 2023

Template:R from gene symbol use

Requested move at Talk:Kinesin-like protein KIF11#Requested move 12 September 2023

Talk:COVID-19 lab leak theory#Request_for_comment

Request for Article Improvement : Common symbiosis signaling

Nomination for deletion of Template:WikiProject Molecular Biology/doc

Requested move at Talk:Mathematical modelling of infectious diseases#Requested move 30 October 2023

Molecular biology / genetics review needed

Infobox for all GPCRs, making it a standard to always include of what G-protein they are coupled to

Help with categorization

Template:Cytoskeletal_proteins

Tools to help fill in redlinked genes?

Requested move at Talk:Citric acid cycle/Archive 3#Requested move 12 December 2023

One of your project's articles has been selected for improvement!

Related Articles

Timelines

Top Qs

Fact Checks