The First Science Post

Here we go.

The first science post will concern an article that, had I not been looking for a particular technique, would have never read, much less found.  This article comes from the Russian Journal of Bioorganic Chemistry, Volume 28, Number 2, year 2002, from pages 136-146.  It was written by V. N. Danilevich and E. V. Grishin and is titled A New Approach to the Isolation of Genomic DNA from Yeast and Fungi: Preparation of DNA-containing Cell Envelopes and Their Use in PCR .

First, a quick summary.  If you didn't get it from the title, this article describes a new, simplified method for isolating DNA from yeast and fungal species for analysis by PCR (for the non-science readers, a way to get the DNA, in a usable form, from certain species that are not always the easiest to get DNA from).  The authors apply this method to a number of different strains and use control PCR reactions to prove the worth of their method.  This method is relatively simple, as it requires some heating, cooling, and centrifugation.  That's about it.  No glass beads, no mortar and pestle, no sonication.  This makes the procedure simple and easy.  The authors then go on to show how this method can be used to do some basic fingerprinting to aid in classification of yeast/fungal species.  I'm not going to focus on that as I am not a geneticist.

So now that you have a basic idea of what the article is about, let's get into the science.  First, there's a reason this paper isn't in Nature, Science, JBC, etc.  It doesn't have the impact that some of these others do.  It's biggest contribution is in providing a better way to extract DNA from difficult fungal species for use in evaluating the genome of these yeast.  However, the "weaker" journal is not indicative of the way the science was done.  The authors do a good job explaining why they ran certain experiments to test changes in their methods.  There are appropriate controls and measurements at each step to show what went where.  Their final conclusion about the DNA and RNA left behind, in an insoluble lump, seems fairly reasonable and has a citation for further clout.  I don't have any particular problem with the science, other than it being somewhat boring.  Necessary, but boring.

The way in which the article is written is a solid mix of good, mediocre, and bad.  How much of this (if any) is a result of translation and cultural differences is difficult to discern, but we'll continue on with the critique as before.  The style of the article is probably its strongest point.  For being an article on a less-exciting problem, the style is very engaging.  The paper reads like a story (or as much of a story as I've seen in a journal article), which is especially nice, considering method papers tend to be droll.  The figures used are fine: all gels showing PCR product or isolated nucleic acids.  Nothing to write home about, either good or bad.  The weakest part of the article, from a writing perspective, is its organization.  A method paper should be straightforward in its organization, as readers will likely try to emulate the results or apply them to a slightly different system.  This article lacks such organization.  All the necessary details are present, but they are not presented in a way that makes the reader's job easy.  An easy way to fix this would be to include a flow chart of the process.  One more figure that would fix 95% of the organization issue.

All in all, this is a fair paper that sufficiently, but not masterfully, does its job.  The science is useful, but not particularly groundbreaking.  The next article I'll review is from a recent Nature publication concerning the secondary structure of filamentous actin.  Now I'm off to purify some DNA from yeast...