Just because it looks like letter soup, doesn’t mean there isn’t meaning. When I read your example:
“O-GlcNAc signaling entrains the circadian clock by inhibiting BMAL1/CLOCK ubiquitination,”
The word that struck me as least comprehensible was “entrains”. That’s the word I’d have changed.
I spent some time looking at O and N glcnac stuff a while back. These are various protein modifiers, used for a stack of different purposes.
I have no idea what MAL1/CLOCK is, but it’s perfectly reasonable to say “if I want to know more, I can look this up”. If I happened to have a desire to know more about the circadian clock (I don’t), I’d probably know what these do already.
Ubiquitination is another one of those protein modifications. It also can have a bunch of different actions and purposes, and if I cared about the circadian clock I could read this paper to learn more about what’s happening here.
So while I agree that it’s pretty dense, the important parts of it are all pretty ordinary if you’re familiar with the field. Glycation and ubiquitination are everywhere; inhibitors and promoters are everywhere; genes and gene expression is everywhere. What the authors are really trying to say is,
“We discovered that glycation in one place inhibits ubiquitination in another place, and this affects the circadian clock. If you care about this, there’s more in our paper.”
Hmm, fair, I think you might get along fine with my coworker from footnote 6 :) I’m not even sure there is a better way to write these titles—but they can still be very intimidating for an outsider.
Just because it looks like letter soup, doesn’t mean there isn’t meaning. When I read your example:
“O-GlcNAc signaling entrains the circadian clock by inhibiting BMAL1/CLOCK ubiquitination,”
The word that struck me as least comprehensible was “entrains”. That’s the word I’d have changed.
I spent some time looking at O and N glcnac stuff a while back. These are various protein modifiers, used for a stack of different purposes.
I have no idea what MAL1/CLOCK is, but it’s perfectly reasonable to say “if I want to know more, I can look this up”. If I happened to have a desire to know more about the circadian clock (I don’t), I’d probably know what these do already.
Ubiquitination is another one of those protein modifications. It also can have a bunch of different actions and purposes, and if I cared about the circadian clock I could read this paper to learn more about what’s happening here.
So while I agree that it’s pretty dense, the important parts of it are all pretty ordinary if you’re familiar with the field. Glycation and ubiquitination are everywhere; inhibitors and promoters are everywhere; genes and gene expression is everywhere. What the authors are really trying to say is,
“We discovered that glycation in one place inhibits ubiquitination in another place, and this affects the circadian clock. If you care about this, there’s more in our paper.”
Hmm, fair, I think you might get along fine with my coworker from footnote 6 :) I’m not even sure there is a better way to write these titles—but they can still be very intimidating for an outsider.