Wikipedia:United States Education Program/Courses/JHU MolBio Ogg 2012/Section 81/Group 81E

Group 81E

This is the Wikipedia page for 410.602 Molecular Biology, 2012, group 81E. This group will be editing the Bacteriophage T12 article.

Use the talk page here to collaborate as a group, when learning to use and navigate Wikipedia, assessing articles, or for any other topic.

Use this page (not the talk page) for article assessments (optional, see Unit 5); rationale for selecting an article (Unit 6); progress reports (Units 9 and 12); and the final report (Unit 14). Please create a new section here for each of those assignments.

Unit 6: Article Selection Rationale

Our group has chosen to work on the Bacteriophage T12 article. The current Wikipedia article is considered a "stub" only a few sentences long, and contains very little, basic information about the phage.

Bacteriophages in general are very interesting and vital organisms to understand when studying microbiology and molecular biology. Phages are very unique and their mechanisms can cause much destruction with little effort. Bacteriophage T12, specifically, has a hand in Scarlet Fever, an infectious disease that affects small children.Bacteriophage T12 carries the speA gene which codes for erythrogenic toxin A. The T12 phage infects the bacteria Streptococcus pyogenes and converts the nontoxigenic strain into a virulent strain. This toxin is a main player in the contraction of Scarlet Fever .The exact source of this speA gene of bacteriophage is unknown however, the presence of a signal peptide coding region in speA shows that this gene might be of bacterial origin . This is an interesting fact about the origin of this speA gene which we can look more for and include the information in the wiki page. We plan to talk about the lysogenic phase of this temperate bacteriophage which is maintained by a repressor which represses all other genes except the speA gene which results in continuous production of the toxin during the lysogenic phase. And then we will include some information about the lytic phase of the bacteriophage. For something that affects so many children, bacteriophage T12 is rather overlooked on its own Wikipedia page. In fact, there is more information about Bacteriophage T12 in the Scarlet Fever article.So we think that more information about bacteriophage T12 needs to be provided on its own page rather than under some other article.

In developing this article more we plan not only on giving more "credit" to the bacteriophage, but also on expanding the information available about phage T12. Sections in this article may include an introduction to Bacteriophage T12, outlining some of the information seen here as well as the mechanisms in which it works. In the mechanism section we plan on including information about where and how T12 integrates into the host genome and about it's lysogenic and lytic pathway. We may also expand on other organisms that Bacteriophage T12 may affect, and how this virus can be contracted and spread. Other important information may include testing and assays for the bacteriophage in addition to how to prevent and kill/ deactivate Bacteriophage T12. Also, if phage T12 has uses in research, industry and vaccinations, we plan on including such information as well.

Unit 9: Progress Report

In the days since we selected our article, a vast majority of our time has been spent in compiling information and finding ways to share any articles, papers or other sources of information we could each find. We have used a shared DropBox folder to share the pdf version of any articles we have found. This way, we are able to pool our resources, and see when we have found the same reference and also find new ones that another group member has found. Some of our highlighting and notes are also shared in this way, again allowing our group to work together and focus on information pertinent to the article, yet do so on our own time. So far, we have found 14 articles to share, and are reading through them to collect research. We have assigned ourselves certain specific topics to research within the umbrella topic of Bacteriophage T12, although these are open to adaptation as our information is compiled. It seems that there is limited available information about phage T12 specifically, with most papers briefly mentioning the phage as part of a discussion about the speA gene. However, even though it has been a bit more time-consuming to find articles with enough relevant information, there is a positive side to that as all our information is important and relevant. We are trying to gather as much information as we can about bacteriophage T12 and have been trying to find out if Bacteriophage T12 is involved in any diseases other than scarlet fever, and if it has a lysogenically virulent effect on any other bacteria in addition to "Streptococcus pyogenes". So far, though, we have not found any evidence for this. It could be that this bacteriophage is only responsible for erythrogenic toxin production by S. pyogenes only. We have included some information about the genome of the phage and the location of the speA gene in the article, even though we could not find a whole lot. Again, we do plan to search more. We are also editing each others' work as information is added to the article to make sure there is uniformity to the references - trying to have PMIDs available for all articles possible, making sure we don't have double mentions of the same reference. In addition, we have spent much time on our group talk page deciding on the way forward.

The article itself has been updated to include some more basic information, and some information on rendering T12 inoperative.So far we plan to include the following sections in this article:

1. Introduction
2. Mechanism/Life cycle
3. Genome
4. Involvement in the Disease Scarlet fever
5. Testing and assays
6. Control of T12

We have not had significant interactions with other editors. One editor made a minor change after the first bit of information was added. In what we have to do further, we feel that some more references are still needed, and we are working on obtaining those as we begin to add to the article. We plan to continue keeping the article updated as we gather and organize our information. We are updating the article slowly as we do not want to add incomplete information. For example, for the mechanism/life cycle section, the contributor will first draft a major chunk of the section of the article that she is responsible for, and then add it to the article page.

Unit 12: Progress Report

This report shows all the progress our group has achieved since our last progress report.

Enhancement of Bacteriophage T12 article

In the time that has passed since the last progress report, we have added a lot more information to the article. Some new sections such as The General Characteristics, Research and Discovery, Disease, and Detection Assays have been added and the Introduction has been re-worked. A few more references have been added to the reference list to support the article.In the next couple of weeks we will be working on improving these sections further by adding some more information, and reviewing and editing what already has been written.

Peer review of our Article

Our article was reviewed, and we are working to incorporate a few of the suggestions. One of the suggestions by Group 81B was to include some information on how T12 was discovered, and that is now included in the article. In addition, a formatting error in reference to citations was pointed out and rectified. We were also reminded to link to other Wikipedia articles, and are looking through our own article to make sure we have linked as much as we can, and will continue to do so. One of our peer reviewers have also suggested to restructure the Research and Discovery section into a timelined/bulleted format which we plan to look into in the coming days. Like last time, we had no major interactions with other Wikipedia editors aside from some thanks for notifying them on the talk page that major changes were about to be made to the article.

Peer review of Group 81C’s article by our group

Each one of us has also given our suggestions to Group 81C about their RT-PCR article. We had a good discussion with the group members, as they answered our questions and addressed our concerns. As far as the major suggestions go, Rasha began the peer-review discussions, and suggested that some adapting be done in terms of section separation. The suggestion was to move some of the Introduction section the area above the Contents box, while incorporating other bits of that information into more relevant sections further on in the article. For example, there was a paragraph about what RT-PCR was used for, which could be included later in Applications or put with the Uses section, which at that point was still remaining as part of the article from before Group 81C began their edits. One more suggestion Rasha made was to adjust the spacing between End Point RT-PCR and Real Time RT-PCR, as the extra space gives the impression that a new section has started when, in reality, we were informed that it is still a subsection. Both Rachael and Shivani suggested that some links to other Wikipedia pages be added to the article. Rachael also suggested that some repetitive sentences be changed, while Shivani pointed out some grammatical errors that the writers and editors had missed. We all agreed that Group 81C has done a stellar job of enhancing the RT-PCR article so far.

Finally, in terms of what is remaining, we are planning to add two figures to the article - one as part of the Detection Assays section, and one as part of the Genome section. In addition, the Genome and Disease section will be further expanded. Most of our major additions are done. We will continue to edit each others' work and add on if necessary - as Shivani was just able to do for Rasha's addition of the Research and Discovery section. We were just given even more suggestions from our peer-reviewers in Group 81B, and we plan on using those as guidelines to take us through the final deadline of this project.

Final Progress Report

Our significant contributions:

• Complete revamp of the article. When we started on the Bacteriophage T12 article, it was just a stub. It is now a more significant article, consisting of various sections that give much more information about the phage than was previously available on Wikipedia.
• The sections we added include:
  • Research and Discovery
  • Genome
  • Diseases
  • Bacteriophage T12 Control
  • Detection Assays
• We were able to add most of the sections we initially planned on. Since the mechanism of T12 integration is still unknown, we added the Research & Discovery section instead of the "Mechanism/Life Cycle" section.
• We also added some relevant images.

Main interactions with other editors/peer-reviewers:

• We had the most help from our peer-reviewers in group 81B. Specifically, Hanna, Gisela and Jennifer had a lot of suggestions for us, which we have tried to include as best as we could.
• One other Wikipedia editor did help out with some minor editing here and there. There were no major contributions or interactions, but it was nice to see that this editor was also watching our additions and proofreading for anything we might have missed.