Talk:CH391L/S14/Drew's First assignment

Overall Format and structure: The format and layout of the wiki is appropriate, but the style of writing is unprofessional at times, and occasionally boarders on slang. A few specific examples include: (Under “Toggle Switches”) “Bistability is where a system is under one of two possible conditions.” The “is where” statement is uninteresting, and doesn’t actually describe anything. This could be stated more actively as “toggle switches are synthetic gene regulatory networks which react in an on/off manner, termed bistability. To do so the cell…”

Introduction and background material: The article is on “toggle switches, repressilators, and counter” and the introduction says that these “are processing systems to control gene expression based on environmental cues,” which is a great intro, but it is followed up weakly, stating “counters use…” and “toggle switches use...,” there is no mention of repressilators, and the description of the counters and toggle switches is too passive, restate actively, maybe something like “Counters monitor the frequency of an event through memory…” To summarize: more active description of the three topics, and an actual description of repressilators, or take it out of the title, and just include a subsection later describing it as a related topic. Another example of a poorly written statement, the sentence that contains “keep memory of a certain level of a pollutant and display a reporter gene as a signal,” should be written as “A toggle switch can be used to monitor a specific pollutant, using a reporter gene as a signal when a threshold is reached.” The example listed in the intro with June Medford only pertains to one of the three headline topics (?), while there are no comparable examples for the other two.

Methods and main body/concepts: Pretty solid overall. I think the figures really add, and they are referenced frequently, but they are a little complicated for a Wikipedia page, and seem more appropriate for a literature review article. Also, I feel your definitions of the actual topics are a little locked down (i.e. A repressilator is a synthetic gene network that uses the repression of genes in a negative feedback loop to create an oscillating network measured by GFP expression.” So, repressilators can only use GFP?  Also, GFP is mentioned several times in this paper, and is actually quite important for these topics, but it is never stated what GFP is, and the full name isn’t even written out anywhere.  Alternatively, a link to a GFP page would solve this.

Relation to iGEM and future directions: There are short sentences at the end of each section stating that one iGEM team or another has done a project with toggle switches/counters/repressilators, there is no mention as to what was actually done, or what or how the (toggle switch/repressilator/counter) was used in the research.

Figures, Figure legends, and citations: The figures in this wiki article are complex, but most are effective at complementing the written portion. The final figure, labeled “DIC network” is copied from its article source so poorly a portion of the in article caption is clearly visible. Additionally, I’m not sure the plasmid maps really add anything to the article, they seem to just complicate the issue by bringing in unexplained markings (i.e. what is T1 T2 and T3, there is no mention of them in the article, and are they essential for the repressilator?)