Talk:RNA spike-in

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Jkenchel. Peer reviewers: Jdogzz, JRHall.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 07:39, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Suggestions for Improvement

The only thing I feel that might merit a more precise comment is the naming choice of "spike-in", what prompted the person who named it to choose this expression which does not seem obvious to me from the reading of the article. Aside from that, I suggest more carefully adding in internal Wikipedia references for terminology as you use it, and check out the Main Article Wikipedia page for the main article links you've used, rather than a "See Also" link that is currently used a few times under your section headings.-Jdogzz (talk) 21:32, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

Thanks! The Main Article thing was something I was wondering about. I thought that doing "Main Article" was correct, but the first few Wikipedia pages I checked had a "See Also" instead. I'll change that to Main Article. When you say suggest "more carefully adding in internal Wikipedia references", are there any terms or links in particular that you're thinking of? Limiting jargon, and linking to Wikipedia pages that define the jargon I use, was the thing that I was trying to be most careful about. Did I accidentally link to the wrong page somewhere? -Jkenchel (talk) 23:59, 26 October 2017 (UTC)

I changed the "See Also"s to the Main Article template. I also went through and added Wikilinks where missing. As for the source of the name, I wasn't able to find out where it came from... -Jkenchel (talk) 22:11, 27 October 2017 (UTC)

I suggest a link to the "Nucleic acid hybridization" Wikipedia article when you define hybridization. You may want to rephrase the first sentence to be more inclusive of other RNA spike-in uses (e.g., when quantifying by RT-PCR or NGS), which you actually allude to later. Can you check the use of reference 4 for spike-in synthesis - this paper seems to be computational. I am curious if you can find a better reference for the production of spike-in sequences in vivo (this sounds much more difficult than in vitro transcription or oligo synthesis since one would have to purify the transcript); reference 9 seems to use synthetic oligos. I would also probably say 'many' rather than 'every' when talking about detection of mRNA transcripts, since with a microarray you only can see what you were looking for (i.e., the DNA on your chip). Ireneachen (talk) 17:30, 27 October 2017 (UTC)

Thank you! I must have accidentally chosen the wrong citation for the part about synthesis. Let me check that and fix it. -Jkenchel (talk) 22:11, 27 October 2017 (UTC)

Yeah, I completely had the wrong citations there. I fixed it and removed the sentence about ease of in vivo production in the lab. The review article I cited for this section talks more about researchers being able to produce spike-ins via plasmid vectors in bacteria than about ordering from companies; I read too much into that and accidentally inserted my own misguided assumptions when writing the article. -Jkenchel (talk) 22:34, 27 October 2017 (UTC)

I think the mention of "non-specific binding" in your history section could benefit from an additional link. I do not see a direct link available on Wikipedia, but perhaps a link to their "Complementary (molecular biology)" page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complementarity_(molecular_biology) in conjunction with a bit more text definition would be appropriate. JRHall (talk) 18:54, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

Great suggestion. Thanks! I changed it as you suggested. -Jkenchel (talk) 21:59, 30 October 2017 (UTC)