Talk:CH391L/S14/Gabo's First Assignment

Overall Format and structure: Although the subject of Probiotics is interesting, the overall format, structure and grammar of this document makes it somewhat frustrating to read. For example, the second sentence of the first paragraph has a “by by” and last sentence of same paragraph should be re-written or excluded because it doesn’t really make sense.

Introduction and background material: I felt the introduction was lacking a bit more depth. Maybe mentioning the types or varieties of bacteria or a sentence or two about the importance of the microbiome would have made it more enticing.

Methods and main body/concepts: I did appreciate that this document has some interesting information about current approaches using probiotics to treat disease. Again, this section could also have been much broader since there is much more current research regarding probiotics and their role in health.

Here, I’d also recommend adding a table providing the most common species known to have beneficial effects for human health.

Relation to iGEM and future directions: I really liked what the iGEM set out to accomplish through the use of E.coli as probiotic to potentially treat Inflammatory Bowel Disease. This sort of endeavor could help unravel some of the unknowns of this common health problem and suggest new possible treatments.

Figures, Figure legends, and citations: The image given at the introduction is not visible without clicking on it, which affects the overall feel and quality of the wiki page. In any case, it would have been much better to have placed it in the same manner as the other two images in the document. Also, captions on it have bad grammar, like “Substances that produced by one microbe that stimulate…” and another of the captions has two words compacted together (thatcontribute). There’s not really sequential correlation between the facts given, therefore the use of an arrow in the image doesn’t convey further understanding of the ideas.

I liked the second image because it really gave a very simple representation of the experiment described. Some other graphs showing the equilibrium between healthy gut bacteria and fungi or other pathogens would seem proper here to broaden the discussion.

Citations are good, but when laid out in the end these should stick to the same format, for example here not all references had included the title of the article.