Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Tumor necrosis factor/archive1

Tumor necrosis factor

Featured article candidates/Tumor necrosis factor/archive1

Nominator(s): AdeptLearner123 (talk) 05:40, 8 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This article is about a chemical messenger that mediates the immune system and is a key factor in several autoinflammatory conditions. This article passed GAR a few days ago, so I am now nominating it for FA status.

AdeptLearner123 (talk) 05:40, 8 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The paragraph beginning ‘In 1975, Elizabeth Carswell and…’ is unsupported. - SchroCat (talk) 06:34, 8 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Image review

Suggest adding alt text

All images past the lead should be scaled up

All images past the lead also need sources for the data presented. Nikkimaria (talk) 05:11, 9 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Ajpolino

Hi AdeptLearner123, welcome to FAC. I'm glad to see you're interested in continuing to improve this article. I'll work my way through the article and try to summarize feedback below. Right now I think the article needs quite a bit of work to meet the FA criteria, which are a higher bar than the GA criteria. Unfortunately we don't get many molecular biology FACs; in fact I can't recall one in the several years I've had a lazy eye on FAC (though someone cleaned up PfEMP1 for WikiJournal of Medicine in 2017, so perhaps that's a decent model to consider). I'm still going through the article, and of course you're most welcome to ignore me, but my suggestion would be to withdraw the nomination and start a WP:Peer review to try to solicit more feedback on improving the article to the FA standard. At the same time, keeping an eye on – and participating in – the FAC process will help you move through the process yourself. Alright comments below, separated by FA criterion. All are suggestions, rather than demands.

1c. Well researched - Sourced to high-quality, reliable sources

History - We try to build our articles from secondary sources (i.e. we are volunteer non-experts summarizing experts who are summarizing the literature). You may be used to writing academic science articles where the goal is slightly different (there your name/institution/reputation establishes you as the expert, and you wield your expertise to summarize a topic). So instead of summarizing key papers and citing those papers, find reviews on the history of TNF and summarize those. That way the established experts are guiding us as to which moments in history are important, rather than the reader trusting that a Wikipedia editor has curated the history appropriately. You might find Help:Wikipedia editing for medical experts a useful skim.
History#Isolation - "When TNF was ... weight of 45,000 kDa" I'm not a biochemist, but I think the distinction in the paper is that in the first case they denatured what came off the HPLC column with SDS PAGE (and so you get the monomer). In the second they used non-denaturing conditions (and so you get the trimer). If I had to summarize reverse phase HPLC in a few words (which no one would trust me to do) I'd say "which separates molecules by their hydrophobicity". Your summary "which breaks proteins into constituent molecules" would be my short summary of tandem mass spectrometry.
The publisher MDPI has a checkered reputation, and is often (though not always) a place authors will publish if they lack the results, prestige, or mainstream acceptance to publish elsewhere. Since our goal is to summarize the best sources available, we often avoid MDPI journals, or at least carefully consider why each adds irreplaceable and reliable information to the article. You cite three articles in International Journal of Molecule Science.
Ditto Frontiers Media journals, though my personal opinion is that folks are less wary of Frontiers journals than MDPI journals.

1a. Well-written, "Prose is engaging..."

Lead - I'm not sure if "mediates the immune system" will have much meaning to most readers. Could we clarify to something like "... messenger produced by immune cells that induces inflammation."
Lead - "~~target~~ receptors" not sure target contributes any meaning.
Lead - Is there a difference between "immunocytokines" and "cytokines" (which this redirects to)?
Lead - "without dependence on the synthesis of other proteins." I'm not sure this distinction needs to be in the lead.
Lead - "include... [list]... among others" is redundant.
Lead - "TNF plays a role... such as contributing to..." the grammar is a bit weird. "Roles... such as..."? Or if that's the only non-immune role you can just drop the "such as".
Lead - "Excessive production of TNF is a key factor in inflammatory disorders..." you already told us this at the end of paragraph 1.
Lead - "Due to the important and complex role of TNF in the immune system..." you can probably cut that. We know it from the rest of the section. Reads as editorializing.
History#Isolation - "with the protein-rich segments identified by their absorption of 280nm light." this seems an unimportant detail. That's just how protein chromatography works.
History#Isolation - I think the experimental detail in this section could be trimmed a bit without losing the thread of the TNF story (e.g. do we care that they used a 42 bp probe?)
History#Physiological - "June 1981" it reads odd to mark every discovery with just a year, except for this one which gets a month. Do we care that this discovery was in June?
History#Physiological - "The accumulating evidence...cancer treatment" reads as editorializing, and comes as a surprise since it seems poorly related to the rest of the section (which is a walk through history).
In general, the history section is a choppy read. "In year X, this happened. In year Y, this happened. Etc." And the steps back in time for each subsection are a bit unnatural. It would be great if the section could run chronologically instead, as is typical for histories. That said, I appreciate that there are several semi-overlapping lines of research; so perhaps a chronological story isn't possible.
Gene#Expression - "TNF is denoted as TNFSF2 in the tumor necrosis factor superfamily" what does this have to do with gene expression?
Gene#Enhanceosome - "The composition... compatible binding site" This feels like unnecessary detail.
Gene#Enhanceosome - "The CRE and ... and transcription machinery." I don't really follow the distinction you're drawing here between core and anchor complexes. Is this a common concept in gene regulation?
Gene#Other - "The transcription factor NF-κB ...to the promoter" seems to have more detail than is necessary for the TNF story.
Gene#Regulation - "Several studies... Other studies" is WP:WEASEL WORDS, or maybe just scientist speak. You could start every sentence in the article with "Some studies have shown..."
Gene#Regulation - "have also been found to regulate" = "also regulate" The latter is shorter and clearer writing.
Evolution - maybe this is personal preference, but I think Evolution could be elevated to a full-blown section. The material really relates to TNF as a whole, moreso than the rest of the Gene section.

Continuing, just have to step away from the computer for a bit! Stay tuned. Ajpolino (talk) 20:44, 9 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]