Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Sequence alignment

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[edit] Sequence alignment

I've been working slowly but steadily on this article and its daughters for about a month now, and it's been significantly improved in technical detail, comprehensiveness, and referencing. The subject is a central topic in bioinformatics that is nevertheless commonly misunderstood by students and casual users of common sequence alignment tools. It's had a very helpful peer review and I'm interested to see how it fares here. Opabinia regalis 03:10, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

• Support—My, this is well written indeed. Why can't all FACs be like this? Just a few points.
  • Programmers use ", then" in their code, but when writing for a broader audience, avoid it as a marker of sequence unless absolutely necessary.
  • Do use "the" consistently—not the telegram language that so many scientists use.
  • Just a few more commas might be considered, although it's partly a matter of personal style. After sentence-initial adverbial/prepositional phrases, and before "such as", "because", "but" and "including" are possibilities.
  • Consider using em dashes for some nested clauses that already contain commas.
  • I've removed a few idle "alsos".
  • In a few places, you over-favour "or" over "and" in lists.
  • Avoid "Note that ..." in this register. Tony 04:15, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

  Thanks! I've made a few minor changes given your comments. I'm both a scientist and a programmer, so I get both sets of idiosyncrasies. Also, thanks for taking care of my extraneous "alsos". Opabinia regalis 04:42, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

• Comment Image:RPLP0 90 ClustalW aln.gif should be in PNG. WP 09:09, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

  I actually replaced that image with another one in PNG format that illustrates two different coloring/characterization schemes and is a less raggedy alignment. Opabinia regalis 01:14, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

• Comment the following passage, "A variety of computational algorithms have been applied to the sequence alignment problem, the most intuitive of which is dynamic programming." (emphasis mine) sounds biased. I haven't found where in the article it is explained why dynamic programming maps onto the problem in a more intuitive way than other methods. Regards, Samsara (talk • contribs) 09:22, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

  Hrm, I think you're right. Reworded. (edit conflict: that was fast, thanks!) Opabinia regalis 01:14, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

• Support - Samsara (talk • contribs) 01:10, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
• Support - Opabinia, you've really done some great work on these topics in a short time. --Aranae 01:41, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
• Support - I don't know much abuot the subject, but it looks like a good article. Viva La Vie Boheme 16:50, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
• Support - Nice article ont he subject matter. -- Shane ^{(talk/contrib)} 01:25, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
• Comment - one minor nitpick, the reference tags appear both before and after the punctuation, they should just be after.--Peta 02:55, 21 July 2006 (UTC)

  Thanks, I think I got them all. Opabinia regalis 03:15, 21 July 2006 (UTC)

• Support It's good to see a technical topic elucidated so well in W'pedia. Reimelt 21:21, 22 July 2006 (UTC)