Hi Juliaq, your article on Ulocladium botrytis looks great so far! You have a lot of points about your fungus and many references to back these up, and I think these points will make a great article once you've put them into sentence-form! All of my suggestions are for fairly minor edits. I would suggest that you consider using less scientific terminology so that your article can be read by a wider audience, for example instead of saying ”is xerophilic”, say “can grow with low available water”. Either that or include a link to xerophilic in the article so that if someone doesn't know the meaning of a term they can quickly learn more about it. Also, in the Impact on human health section, you stated that U.botrytus releases an allergen homologous to Alt a 1 but also that Alt a 1 was detected in U.botrytus. You should clarify this section, does U.botrytus produce both Alt a 1 and the Alt a 1 homologue? It might also be helpful to provide more information on the alt 1 a, especially since there isn't wikipedia page dedicated to this allergen. In addition, it might be useful to specify which type of hypersensitivity can be caused by Alt a 1, ie is it IgE mediated, is it type I, type II, etc. Reading about the allergens in your source, Orthologous Allergens and Diagnostic Utility of Major Allergen Alt a 1 (Moreno 2016), Ulocladium botrytis seems to be a fairly common cause of household allergies, you may want to mention this or other data on the prevalence of hypersensitivity caused by Ulocladium botrytis. Your article looks great so far, good luck on your final draft! Spipke (talk) 22:37, 27 October 2017 (UTC)
Hi Julia!
Your article is looking good so far! You have a lot of informative, concise points! Here are some suggestions:
In your History and Taxonomy section, you should link "nomina nuda" and "hyphomycetous" to the already existing Wikipedia pages (nomen nudum, hyphomycetes). This will be helpful to the reader who may not have prior knowledge of these terms. Although it is already included in the Taxobox, you could restate the date that Ulocladium botrytis was first identified. Perhaps you could also briefly expand on why U. botrytis was misidentified as Alternaria maritima (Do they share similar morphological characteristics? Were they found growing in the same environment?). It may also be helpful to include the year that Curran first discovered A. maritima and the year that the fungus was verified and concluded to actually be U. botrytis. Provided that these dates can be found, I think this will make it clearer for the reader to follow along.
In your Growth and Morphology section, make sure you link words like, "hyphae", "mycelium", and "conidiophores" to their associated Wikipedia pages. Also, as there is no associated Wikipedia page for the term, "obovoid" and most readers may not know what it means, maybe you could very briefly define what it means or describe the conidia in a different way. In the second last point, maybe you could expand on what your fungus uses nitrogen for. I think the last point ("grows in damp indoor environments") fits better in the Habitat and Ecology section. Overall, I think you have concise points in this section that answer the main questions.
Here is a paper about a specific case of chronic sinusitis caused by U. botrytis in case you would like to mention it as an example in your "Impacts on human disease" section. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3279772/
In general, when using specific scientific terms that may not be well-known to the reader, you can link the term to an associated Wikipedia page, provide a brief definition of the term, or maybe use a different descriptor (if possible), so that the tone is scientific and professional, but can still be understood by a reader who does not have an extensive science background. The following Wikipedia article is a good example of this: Apophysomyces variabilis
Hope this helps! Great job and Good Luck!