Wikipedia:Peer review/Cylindrospermopsin/archive1

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[edit] Cylindrospermopsin

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This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I need a fresh set of eyes on a topic that I've worked on from within. Any comments welcome.

Thanks, Freestyle-69 (talk) 07:50, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

Ruhrfisch comments: Interesting and fairly well done article. Here are some suggestions for improvement - please note I tend to give examples of problems and that these are not usually an exhaustive list (if I give one typo, there may be many more):

  • A model article is often helpful as a guide and for examples to follow. I note that WikiProject Chemicals has 7 FAs including Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide and Paracetamol, which may be good models.
  • Per WP:LEAD the lead should be expanded to summarize the whole article. My rule of thumb is that every header should mentioned somehow in the lead, even if only as a word or phrase.
  • Since CYN and CYL are listed in the first sentence as alternate names, I would also list them in the infobox.
  • Article seems to overuse bold (sorry, couldn't help myself) - see WP:MOS#Italics
  • Organizationally, I think the "Related toxic blooms and their impact" section could come later in the article - the article is about a chemical compound, but we learn very little about it until the fourth section (So I would make it lead, background, chemistry - you may disagree of course)
  • The figures 1-6 do not do a lot for me, but could be made more useful. While I know the chemical literature numbers figures, I have not seen this a lot at Wikipedia. Also, if I am not mistaken, Figure 1 is repeated twice more - it is the right tautomer in Figure 2 and it is epiCYN in Fig 5 (Fig 4 is also repeated in Fig 5 as CYN). So in the name of avoiding needless repetition, could you get rid of both Fig 1 and Fig 4? The caption for Fig 2 just be something like: Proposed tautomerism between the keto and enol forms, showing the hydrogen bond between the uracil nitrogen and the guanidino hydrogen. The right tautomer is the initial incorrect proposed structure of cylindrospermopsin (CYN), with its four rings labelled (A-D). The incorrect feature was the orientation of the hydroxyl group. Perhaps label the parts 2a and 2b for reference in the article? I also note the rings are not labelled A-D. Similarly Fig 4 caption could be added to Fig 5.
  • Could color or circles or some means of highlighting be used to make clearer the parts of structures being discussed in the Figures 1-6? For example could the hydroxyl (OH) in Fig. 1 be red or circled to make it clearer that this is where the stereochemistry was wrong in the initial proposal?
  • Per WP:HEAD please do not repeat the article title in Headers - so for example "Toxicology of CYN" could be "Toxicology" as we already know the article is about CYN. Also could have subheads Analogues, Synthesis, Stability
  • There are several short sections (two sentences in "Current methods of analysis in water samples") that could be combined with another section or perhaps expanded. Short paragraphs and sections break up the flow of the article.
  • Refs look OK except for the last item - what is this? A See also perhaps? National Center for Environmental Assessment. Toxicological Reviews of Cyanobacterial Toxins: Cylindrospermopsin (NCEA-C-1763)

Hope this helps. If my comments are useful, please consider peer reviewing an article, especially one at Wikipedia:Peer review/backlog (which is how I found this article). Yours, Ruhrfisch ><>°° 19:27, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks very much, all your comments are valid and I think that all of your suggestions should be effected. I'll wait for some more comments if they arrive, and edit in due course. Cheers Freestyle-69 (talk) 22:10, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
If you have not already asked, please see if you can find someone at WP:PRV or the Chemistry / Chemicals WikiProjects. Ruhrfisch ><>°° 15:27, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
  • Comment - there is a lot of passive, past tense in long sentences in this article. For example, instead of saying "Isolation of the toxin using algae cultured from the original Palm Island strain was achieved by gel filtration of an aqueous extract, followed by reverse-phase HPLC." it is clearer to say "The toxin was first isolated from an aqueous extract of algae cultured from the original Palm Island strain. It was purified using gel filtration and then reverse-phase HPLC." Tim Vickers (talk) 21:52, 27 May 2008 (UTC)