Talk:CH391L/S14/Artemisinin


 * --Dennis Mishler (talk) 17:10, 14 April 2014 (CDT) Nice article, Liz. My one main critique is that the first figure seems a bit blurry.  Can you get a better resolution photo?


 * --Dennis Mishler (talk) 17:10, 14 April 2014 (CDT) It might be nice to add something about similar pathways or attempts to make similar or other natural product molecules in bacteria...


 * --Jorge Vazquez (talk) 08:44, 18 April 2014 (CDT)Very good job Liz. Very easy to read, comprehensive and interesting wiki. I learned a lot from this article. My main concern is that most of the techniques if not all that have been used to optimize the production of this molecule are traditional metabolic/genetic engineering techniques and I don't see a lot of innovation in terms of synthetic biology tools but that's just my opinion and I might have the wrong take on this.


 * --Gabriel Suarez (talk) 8:54, 18 April 2014 (CDT)I found the structure and clarity of this article very good. So maybe add "plant" in intro definition for Artemisin: "Artemisinin is a natural plant product whose derivatives form the basis for antimalarial medication." Only additional thing was that when I was reading the part on optimization and you mentioned "They also expressed an ADS enzyme optimized for E. coli", I think you need to clear what you mean by optimization here.  You mean codon optimization? Maybe you can describe it better. Images useful and links ok...just it would be good to have the link for what that iGEM team worked on.

--Chen-Hsun Tsai (talk) 11:04, 21 April 2014 (CDT) Very clear layout and structure. I think this wiki is good and I only have a small thing: you might need a reference in your figure 1.

--Dennis Mishler (talk) 07:48, 18 April 2014 (CDT) Mindy's Critique

Overall Format and structure: The overall format and structure was very well laid out. The brief introduction gives a succinct explanation of what is to follow, and the rest of the paragraphs follow an order that makes sense. The tone is appropriate, and the overall wording is as well. The only comment for this portion would be that the article is extremely technical, but unfortunately due to the nature of the topic, this seems rather unavoidable. Overall this was a very good wiki.

Introduction and background material: The one line description at first seemed odd, but once taken in context with the history made complete sense; it is a quick way to introduce the topic such that it can be interpreted by the reader in a single glance and yet still provide meaningful information. The history section provides context for the rest of the article, which is very helpful. It introduces the compound, its uses and the problem with obtaining it. The only thing that might be added is a sentence about the impact of malaria that would give readers a sense of the compound's importance, but this is not completely necessary.

Methods and main body/concepts: I found no issues with the main body of the article- it is extremely well explained and thorough. It provides a complete picture of the semisynthesis process, which is the focus of this class since that is the portion related to synthetic biology. Inclusion of the figures made it understandable and complemented it well.

Relation to iGEM and future directions: The future directions section was good, it indicated what could be developed further and also the level of difficulty involved. The “Other Strategies” section was also a nice addition, because it gave the reader a sense of how important the semisynthesis pathway was in the ability to create useful amount of the drug. The iGEM section was remarkably short, but it is possible that this information is all that was available. If there is a link available to the information that was found, or if there is any sort of diagram available, this might add to the section in a positive way.

Figures, Figure legends, and citations: In the very first line it might be advantageous to have a small figure of the actual structure of Artemisinin so the reader doesn't have to go looking for it in the synthesis pathways below. All other legends were extremely helpful and well described in the legends. There were ample and proper citations, and each citation had a very clear indicator beneath that described what it referenced.