User talk:LevanaYang/sandbox

Assignment 1: Critique of Bacterial Circadian Rhythms

The presence of an endogenous circadian clock in prokaryotes, particularly, cyanobacteria, is the focus of the Wikipedia article, “Bacterial Circadian Rhythms”. The article introduces readers to the basic ideas of circadian rhythm and its associated discoveries in bacteria. It also contains relevant, working hyperlinks throughout the article to help users find more information. Many of the references, however, are not added as clickable links, particularly, in the introduction, but the references that are cited are relevant, neutral, and credible (peer-reviewed journals). It is apparent that this article is still in its infancy and has much potential for further expansion and revision. Unfortunately, its Talk page contains a negligible number of posts and has been dormant since 2009. Also, there have only been a few additions to the page, despite the emergence of journal articles that support new information, such as articles on the function of the clock proteins KaiB and KaiC . There is a lot of room for improvement in the section about molecular mechanism of bacterial circadian rhythm which currently only focuses on the protein structures of the clock proteins. Other components of the bacterial circadian clock system, such as input proteins CikA and LdpA, have been found in addition to the ones in this article. The flow of the article may also be improved by reducing the amount of repetition of historical facts. Circadian rhythms are a fascinating part of our daily lives and there are many insights to be gained from building this article.

LevanaYang (talk) 05:49, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

Reflection

I learned a lot about the concept of circadian rhythm and chronobiology in this assignment. It was not too difficult looking for sources on this subject. Moreover, the most difficult part was sifting through all the information and choosing which parts to incorporate into my review, while keeping it under 250 words.

-LevanaYang (talk) 05:24, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

Assignment 2: Wikipedia Article Candidate: Halobacteriaceae

Halobacteriaceae is an organism of interest due to inhabiting niches of high temperature, pH, and, most notably, high salinity. Halobacteriaceae comprises one of the three main groups of Halophilic Archaea, and members of its family are a very well-researched and well-documented area of study. Journal articles are constantly coming out about newly discovered Haloarchaea, particularly those originating from China, and there have been many journal articles and books discussing its taxonomy, unique metabolic pathways, and phylogenetic characteristics from members of its family. In contrast to its notability, the Halobacteriaceae Wikipedia article has not received much attention and contains some glaring issues that I plan to amend for Assignment 3. Most concerningly, the article introduction has grammatical errors and is poor at generally describing the Halobacteriaceae family which contains a large amount of genus and species (47 genera and 165 species at the time of March 2014). Furthermore, the last two sentences have been directly plagiarized from sourced journals without any context. I plan to restructure the section by removing any plagiarized components and provide a clearer general introduction to Halobacteriaceae. Specifically, I’d like to introduce the diversity of members of this group by emphasizing some of its unique environmental niches and notable characteristics, such as red-pink pigment in many members of the group, affinities to different pH levels, and different morphologies. I also plan to mention methods that have been used for taxonomic classification of members of the family, including chemotaxis, polar lipid analysis, 16S rRNA analysis, and DNA-DNA hybridization, which are frequent subjects in literature. Lastly, I plan to add information about contributions by Halobacteriaceae to global nutrient cycling, and beneficial relationship with vegetation growing in high-saline environments.

LevanaYang (talk) 04:42, 28 September 2017 (UTC)