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    1. On 2021-02-28 11:04:58, user Andrew Teschendorff wrote:

      In this 2021 commentary, Rahmani et al effectively acknowledge most of the criticism we raised in our earlier preprint Jing, H., Zheng, S.C., Breeze, C.E., Beck, S. & Teschendorff, A.E. Calling differential DNA methylation at cell-type resolution: an objective status-quo. bioRxiv 822940 (2019), following our recommendations, to add the PPV metric in their evaluations, and including smoking EWAS, a scenario for which a more reasonably gold-standard set of loci exists. Most importantly however, they also alter their method, presenting a new TCA (X|Y) model. Yet, in the abstract of their commentary, they state that we “misused” their TCA method, falsely claiming that the TCA (X|Y) model was “part of their original TCA paper”. However, in our critique of the TCA paper, we implemented TCA using the recommended settings as specified in their TCA R-package. Specifically, the TCA method implemented in their TCA R-package (1.1.0) was TCA (Y|X), with the recommended marginal model as the default, which is the one we therefore used, since this is the version of TCA that was also used in their original TCA paper, and for which comparative results to CellDMC were presented in the main figures of their TCA paper. Thus, there was no misconception on our side. We were bound to using the version of TCA as presented and compared to CellDMC.<br /> Moreover, the fundamental misconception was made by Rahmani et al since they compared the TCA (Y|X) joint and marginal models to our CellDMC algorithm, which by construction implements a marginal conditional test, using only the sensitivity metric for evaluation, ignoring the all-important PPV metric. Had Rahmani et al included the PPV metric in their evaluations, this would have alerted them to the very low precision of the TCA (Y|X) model. Indeed, it is precisely because we pointed out to them the need to consider the PPV metric, that Rahmani et al have now altered their recommended TCA method from “TCA (Y|X) marginal” to “TCA (X|Y) marginal conditional”, which we note is now a very similar model to CellDMC. Indeed, we note that CellDMC models the data (X) in terms of the phenotype or exposure (Y), and implements a marginal conditional test. This explains why according to say Fig.1 in their new commentary, CellDMC and TCA (X|Y) perform almost identically.

    1. On 2020-03-12 10:25:45, user Matt Hodgkinson wrote:

      I was asked to comment on this by Richard Van Noorden for this Nature piece: Hundreds of scientists have peer-reviewed for predatory journals doi: 10.1038/d41586-020-00709-x. It’s useful to study the peer review of potentially predatory journals, especially as this is one of the factors that people are most concerned about with these journals. The recent consensus definition that the authors cite (and which I co-authored with some of them) deliberately left out peer review quality because measuring this is presently too subjective, and this kind of research helps fill that gap. Taking advantage of Publons data is innovative.

      I'm not surprised that reviewers for potentially predatory journals are more likely to be from lower-income countries. These journals are often essentially local journals masquerading as international journals. Also, this matches the demographics of their authorship and they will likely ask past authors to review for them (as do reputable journals), though we cannot check this because prior publication by the reviewers in potentially predatory journals was not assessed and those data are not available.

      The search found only 5.2 reviews per potentially predatory journal versus 27.7 reviews per reputable journal, showing a clear under-representation of potential predators - however, this might be confounded by the publication volumes of these journals. Even when deliberately enriching for potentially predatory journals (half their sample), the authors still found that 90% of reviewers had never posted a review to Publons for a potential predator, which is somewhat comforting. That number cannot be generalized as "10% of reviewers have reviewed for a predatory journal": a representative sample of journals or researchers would likely show a much lower proportion reviewing for potentially predatory journals. Cabell's may have required confidentiality to allow use of their list, but without the data being available it's not clear whether there is a skew in the number of reviews for potentially predatory journals, i.e. were some much more represented than others?

      Finding some potential predators had claimed reviews does not indicate that they necessarily conduct peer review as most researchers would recognise it - the authors point to several previous examples of evidence of superficial review and this is what Richard found too when speaking to such reviewers. They are likely going through the motions and using these reviewers as a fig leaf, what I've previously referred to as a "cargo cult". Those who are happy with the process may not know any better, especially if they have no experience of high-quality peer review in a reputable journal, either as an author or as a peer reviewer.

      Table 1 gives some interesting insights, though I'd have liked to see a formal statistical analysis of the predictors of frequency of reviewing for potentially predatory journals. The most senior reviewers either did no reviews for potential predators or only did a few - those who did none were less prolific in both their reviewing and publishing than those who did a few; that may be a numbers game (fewer reviews means fewer chances to be caught out) or not reviewing for potential predators may be an indication of better judgment. At the other end of the scale, those with many potentially predatory reviews had a substantially higher rate of reviewing (4.5 times higher than than with no reviews for potentially predatory journals), but they were much more junior and had a much lower publication rate - these researchers appear to be inexperienced and reviewing indiscriminately. However, junior researchers can and do provide high-quality reviews (Evans et al. The characteristics of peer reviewers who produce good-quality reviews. J Gen Intern Med 8, 422–428 (1993). DOI:10.1007/BF02599618), which makes it difficult in practice to use such demographics as a proxy for peer review quality. That said, reviewers appearing to be over-committed could be a useful proxy for low quality. Sites such as Publons that have reviewer leaderboards may be unwittingly gamifying peer review, rewarding volume over high-quality scholarly engagement - so kudos to them for shining a light on the problem (Publons responded to that point in Richard’s piece by noting that they only include reviews for journals in Web of Science in their leaderboards).

      The geographical information was only available for 56% of reviewers, but the results are unsurprising as I noted above. A comparison to the demographics of the 6,611 reviewers who never posted a review for a potentially predatory journal to Publons should have been included as a control analysis. The authors estimate that the reviewers of potentially predatory journals collectively took 30,000 hours to complete the reviews, but that assumes that the time taken to review in reputable journals is generalizable to reviewers who do dozens of reviews for potential predators. I would bet these reviewers are not so diligent.

    1. On 2020-08-16 15:26:56, user SW wrote:

      I keep coming back to this wonderful paper, and I hope that these methods can be used to analyze more COVID-19 patients! One question: for donor M, if you look at the "pre-existing SARS-CoV-2-reactive CD4+ clones in the CM subpopulation 1 year before the infection," how big of a role do they play in the response to SARS-CoV-2? What fraction of responding CD4+ cells are derived from this (presumably cross-reactive) memory population? I am trying to get a sense for whether these preexisting memory cells were very important in fighting off the infection or whether they were just some small fraction of the overall response. Thank you.

    1. On 2020-10-26 11:57:48, user Oscar Conchillo-Solé wrote:

      In the abstract it is mentioned:<br /> "It changes an arginine (R) residue to histidine (H) at position 364"<br /> and in the body text:<br /> "The impact of this spike protein R364H variant (Figure 1)"<br /> However in the Figure1: <br /> "The enlarged inset shows the location of R634H mutation (blue)"<br /> Apart from that, there is no mention to the mutation R364H in the Table1.<br /> I believe there is some kind of confusion here.<br /> In the uniprot sequence for this protein "P0DTC2" the position 364 is an Aspartic (D) while position 634 is an Arginine (R). <br /> Is it possible that the mentions to the residue 364 are errors while the correct one is 634?<br /> thank you.

    1. On 2021-05-01 14:25:56, user Mackenzie Mathis wrote:

      Hello! Nice paper, but I would like to point out a (simple) error. You state in the methods you used "DeepLabCut’s pre-trained human pose model (v2.1.7)" and cite us, thanks! This is great, as you use the model within our framework, but This is NOT a DeepLabCut trained model.

      As we have no preprint/paper yet about the model zoo, we have descriptions on the website (modelzoo.deeplabcut.org), which states that this model is *only* DeeperCut, embedded in our software, and we please ask you cite that paper if you use the model: https://link.springer.com/c....

      As such, you are comparing OpenPose, AlphaPose, and DeeperCut performance. I hope this is helpful, as it's important to get this right. I would also add that you might want to report the benchmark performance of these algorithms, for example, the rankings/performance for these three algorithms has been systematically tested here: https://paperswithcode.com/... (OpenPose is ranked 25, DeeperCut is ranked 27 as of April 2021)

    1. On 2020-10-11 08:11:10, user Marta Nabais wrote:

      This is an interesting and relevant paper by Battram et al, exploring the correlation structure between DNA methylation probes from Illumina 450K array, to estimate proportion of phenotypic variance explained across all sites. It is a useful study to provide evidence for which traits EWAS will likely yield successful identification of associated DNA methylation sites, albeit conclusions are possibly still very limited by sample size.

      As pointed out by the authors, since DNA methylation is a reversible process and this was done using a prospective study design, the inference of association cannot be through causality (as it is in the case of GWAS data, due to SNPs surveyed being in LD with causal variants). Thus, would it perhaps be best to re-name the EWAS-heritability estimates, to avoid driving the reader into thinking this term is comparable with the SNP-heritability term? For example, Futao et al, who recently developed a REML method for 'omics data (including DNA methylation), used rho2 to refer to proportion of phenotypic variance explained by DNA methylation sites. https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-019-1718-z

    1. On 2021-12-02 15:34:05, user Ester Eckert wrote:

      Great article! Super interesting data. I would not say that it disagrees<br /> with our results, it just further zooms in and shows how amazingly complex zooplankton<br /> microbe interactions are and how much we still have to discover.

    1. On 2025-03-25 14:23:39, user JANNE MARKUS TOIVONEN wrote:

      I would like the authours to double check the statement that "RPL3L ribosomes associate with mitochondria". As far as I have understood it is the opposite, ribosomes with RPL3 associate with mitochondria in RPL3L knockouts.

    1. On 2025-07-10 15:28:16, user Mina Bagheri wrote:

      Hi, I have a few questions<br /> For counterfactual generation you brute-force over all the potential perturbations in the cell. How do you define this search space? How many iterations is this?<br /> Also did you consider using gradient-based cf generation methods? My understanding of counterfactual generation was to use the model weights directly, otherwise this is just insilico testing

    1. On 2022-12-15 16:08:05, user Scott B Hansen wrote:

      So what about statins? I get this question a lot. Cholesterol in the brain and blood are regulated separately, but influence each other. A hydrophobic statin with a high fat diet may be beneficial early on. The hydrophobic statin would cross into the brain and reduce astrocyte cholesterol and the high fat diet would compensate for some loss of cholesterol in the blood. However, in later stages when the blood brain barrier is open, cholesterol likely comes from blood. In that case, a hydrophilic statin may be better.

      Statins are also complicated by alterations to prenylation substrates e.g, geranylgeranyl. Prenylation works opposite cholesterol to move protein out of GM1 domains. Raising their concentration could affect the proposed system independent of cholesterol.

    1. On 2024-04-18 19:38:40, user Rishav Mitra wrote:

      Summary:<br /> Transglutaminase 2 (TG2) is a GTP binding/ protein-crosslinking enzyme with therapeutic potential in various conditions such as cancers, Celiac disease, and neurological disorders. TG2 is thought to have two major conformational states, an inactive GTP-bound closed state and a crosslinking-active Ca2+-bound open state. Other groups have previously reported X-ray structures of TG2 that reveal the structural basis for the regulation of transamidation activity by GTP/GDP and Ca2+. Although these studies have suggested that guanine nucleotides and Ca2+ allosterically regulate TG2 activity by inducing global conformational changes, direct evidence for conformational transitions has been lacking so far. The authors of this paper have previously shown that a small-molecule inhibitor, TTGM 5826, inhibits the protein crosslinking activity of TG2 by stabilizing the open conformation. Interestingly, TTGM 5826 prevented the growth of cancer cells which led the authors to conclude that the open conformation is cytotoxic. Therefore, locking TG2 in the open state by small molecules could lead to new therapeutic strategies. <br /> In this study, the authors have investigated how the binding of guanine nucleotides, calcium, and small-molecule inhibitors affects the open and closed conformational states of TG2 using small- angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) and single-particle cryoelectron microscopy (cryo-EM). Additionally, they focused on the discovery of improved small molecule inhibitors compared to TTGM 5826. The major success of this paper is the finding that TG2 can undergo a reversible conformational transition in solution between closed and open states under physiological GTP and Ca2+ concentrations. In addition, the authors have found a new conformational state inhibitor, LM11, that is more potent than TTGM 5826, although the evidence to support the connection between drug potency and TG2 conformational specificity in cells is weak. The authors show that the LM11-bound state has a different conformation from the Ca2+-bound open state. The major weakness of this paper is the lack of mechanistic information to explain the potency of LM11. Hopefully further structural studies will provide further details on the conformational changes induced by LM11 and other inhibitors. <br /> Major points:

      In Figure 3D, the authors explained the different conformations between WT and the R580K mutant under GTP conditions by Kratky plots and fitting using CRYSOL. A Kratky plot normalized by Rg may be a better way to discuss the conformations since normalized Kratky plots emphasize conformational differences. In such a plot the weak shoulder in around q = 0.15A-1 of “open dimer”, which likely comes from the dimer conformation's symmetry, can then be emphasized and discussed.<br /> In the text regarding Figure 4, the authors mentioned 3DFSC but it is not provided in the figures. 3DFSC is one of most important plots in cryo-EM analysis to verify directional resolution and density isotropy. <br /> In Figure 4A, the authors said that the homology model generated from TG3 was an excellent fit for the map under Ca2+ conditions. Considering Figure S2, the fit looks excellent certainly. But it was just a visual evaluation, and quantitative scores to validate the degree of fitness like the Q score should be provided.<br /> In the text mentioning Figure 4B, the authors said “a homology model of TG2 bound to Ca2+ at the three conserved binding sites and found that it was in good agreement with the cryo-EM map”. However, this sentence does not seem to match the figure because Figure 4B shows the calcium-binding sites and the related residues in the model, not including the cryo-EM map. Therefore, we suggest that Figure S2 which shows how the calcium-binding sites fit the map is included in Figure 4 instead of Figure 4B.<br /> In Figure 4, SAXS and Cryo-EM under Ca2+ conditions showed different conformations based on each protein concentration. Do you have information about the concentration of TG2 in human cells and how this relates to regulation? <br /> The authors explained that TG2 R580K mutant forms higher-order oligomers at lower Ca2+ concentrations compared to WT TG2 from Figure 4. However, at this stage, proof that WT TG2 forms higher-order oligomers seems to be only the I(0) value of the red SAXS profile in Figure 4C. In addition, since the profile is well-fitted to the calculated open-dimer profile, readers might not notice the increased I(0) value. Figure S7B looks like a more direct proof of WT TG2 higher-order oligomers under Ca2+ conditions. Therefore, we suggest that Figure S7B is included in Figure 4 or is mentioned in the text related to Figure 4.<br /> In general, SAXS has technical limitations in confirming the presence of oligomeric species due to the possibility of non-specific aggregates, precipitates, and buffer components scattering at low q values. Addressing these sources of low q scattering either through explicit mention in the text or furnishing more direct evidence of the TG2 oligomers may enhance the strength of the claims.<br /> The authors mention that using 3 uM TG2 in cryo-EM made it possible to capture monomeric TG2. The SAXS experiments required higher concentrations (25 uM) for sufficient signal. Given the importance of TG2 dimers in this study, the authors might consider measuring the affinity constant for self-association to confirm that the stoichiometry (homodimer/monomer) in the different experiments is indeed what they expect based on the solution behavior of TG2.<br /> Can the authors explain the significance of the differences in fluorescence emission at each arrow point for no drug vs. LM11 treatment in the BODIPY-GTP binding assays in Figure 5A?<br /> Some discussion regarding the limitations in using two cell lines that possibly differ in expression levels of genes other than TG2, membrane permeability, metabolic activities etc. to assess LM11 potency, can align the conclusions more closely with the data.

      Minor points:

      Table S2 is not mentioned in the text. <br /> In Figure 3D, it is better to describe what concentration of GTP the experimental curves have clearly. Certainly, we can read those based on the values of Rg in Figures 2 and 3B but that’s a bit unfriendly.<br /> There seems to be a typo in the text of Figure 4C. “yellow, see Figure S3C” looks like the correct text because Figure 3C does not include SAXS profiles.<br /> Figures 2 and 3 can be combined to make it easier for the reader to compare between TG2 WT and R580K.<br /> The term “saturated conformational state” in the legend for Figure 3B is not meaningful.<br /> Are the % cell viability data for LM11 and TTGM 5826 normalized to vehicle control?

      Reviewed by Hiroki Yamamura, Rishav Mitra, and James Fraser (UCSF)

    1. On 2019-07-18 05:30:52, user Olivier Gandrillon wrote:

      Dear authors

      This is definitely a nice and important piece of work. I nevertheless find distressing that you seem to ignore a very closely related work using the very same idea of coupling 2 state models of gene expression and inferring conncetion parameters values, published in the two following papers:

      Herbach, U., Bonnaffoux, A., Espinasse, T., and Gandrillon, O. (2017). Inferring gene regulatory networks from single-cell data: a mechanistic approach. BMC Systems Biology 11:105 .

      Bonnafoux, A, Herbach, U, Richard, A, Guillemin, A, Gonin-Giraud, S, Gros, P.A. and Gandrillon, O (2019). WASABI: a dynamic iterative framework for gene regulatory network inference. BMC Bioinformatics 20:220.

      I definitely would think a comparison of the two modeling approaches might be informative to the readers.

      Best

      Olivier

    1. On 2018-06-27 15:02:36, user John Smith wrote:

      Really great work, this dataset will be a fantastic resource for benchmark/comparisons against single cell data. Any chance of a full download of the summary data being made available before publication? Really looking forward to having a look at the data. Thanks!

    1. On 2025-03-03 16:11:50, user hansdb wrote:

      One Corded Ware (CGG107476) and two Bell Beaker individuals (CGG106805 and CGG106737) from your interesting study belong to Y-DNA haplogroup I2-L38 (aka I2a1b2a).<br /> As decribed in my citizen scientist paper ( https://www.academia.edu/115363574/RECONSTRUCTING_THE_JOURNEY_OF_Y_DNA_HAPLOGROUP_I2_S2555_TO_I2_L38_Tracing_Genetic_Footprints_Across_Time_and_Space ) this haplogroup was also related to:<br /> * an EBA Unetice sample from Germany (I0114)<br /> * an EBA Unetice sample from Bohemia (I7959)<br /> * an IA Hallstatt sample from Germany (MBG008)<br /> * an IA La Tène sample from Bohemia (I17327)<br /> * an IA La Tène sample from France: GLN32

      Most interestly this haplogroup also occured among the Urnfield epoch Lichtenstein clan from Osterode-am-Harz. Since it is mentioned (paragrapghs 194 to 196) that very few genomes from the Urnfield Culture exist (as a result of the cremation practice) it would be interesting if the well-preserved samples of the Lichtenstein cave could be integrated in your study.

    1. On 2019-05-14 13:06:09, user John Wilson wrote:

      Dear Readers,

      In the spirit of this preprint server, we respectfully solicit any questions, comments or thoughts that would assist this line of research. Thank you all, sincerest regards,

      John

    1. On 2021-09-01 19:27:42, user Chen Sun wrote:

      This paper developed a universal cryo-EM fiducial for the study of protein-nanobody complexes and validated with two membrane proteins. The only concern is, the process of producing nanobody for membrane protein is long and expensive. A minor point is that the mask used for SFig.3f FSC is obviously too tight.

    1. On 2018-07-11 19:37:30, user Andrew Fleet wrote:

      Nice structure and interesting paper, especially in light of the other recently published structures for Ptch1. It’s also nice to see that you validate our previously published results showing that Ptch1 can repress Smo and respond to ligand in the absence of parts of the C-terminus and the large cytoplasmic loop.

    1. On 2017-08-21 16:14:39, user Friedemann Zenke wrote:

      Having thought about putative rapid compensatory processes for quite some time now, I greatly appreciate modeling efforts in this direction and I read this preprint with great interest. The model’s simplicity is appealing and its behavior intuitively makes sense. I thought of sharing some of my thoughts that I jotted down while skimming through the manuscript.

      First, I was wondering about the notion and importance of a single shared receptor pool in the model. If I understand the model correctly, a strong LTP event at one synapse creates some kind of “vacuum” which then causes depression at other synapses by depleting the shared pool. However, from what I recall from most mechanistic models for the induction of early phase LTP, the assumption generally seem to be that the receptors which are inserted into the postsynaptic density are already present at the synapse or its immediate vicinity. This seems to slightly deviate from the notion of a single shared pool. However, on the slower timescales of receptor trafficking, a shared pool seems a pretty reasonable assumption. I guess this could in principle be modeled as a combination of localized synapse specific pools that are coupled on a slower timescale. However, such a slower coupling may introduce additional lag and have other side unwanted side effects. I was wondering whether the authors have thought about this and if they think it would affect their main findings in any way.<br /> Second, there is at least some experimental evidence (Oh et al., 2015) suggesting that synaptic competition for a shared resource is *not* the cause of synaptic normalization, but that rather third messengers are involved. I was wondering what the authors think about this and whether the model could be “re-interpreted” or “re-invented” for such a third messenger scenario. <br /> Third, while reading I was reminded of the study by Delattre et al. (2015) which has pitched a similar idea of competition for a shared resource. This might or might not be relevant to the study. If I remember correctly, the study was based on a direct comparison to experimental data.

      * Oh, W.C., Parajuli, L.K., and Zito, K. (2015). Heterosynaptic Structural Plasticity on Local Dendritic Segments of Hippocampal CA1 Neurons. Cell Reports 10, 162–169.<br /> * Delattre, V., Keller, D., Perich, M., Markram, H., and Muller, E.B. (2015). Network-timing-dependent plasticity. Front. Cell. Neurosci. 220.

    1. On 2019-11-18 08:14:45, user Tanai Cardona Londoño wrote:

      "Our mutation rate estimates for baboons raise a further puzzle in suggesting a divergence time between apes and Old World Monkeys of 67 My, too old to be consistent with the fossil record; reconciling them now requires not only a slowdown of the mutation rate per generation in humans but also in baboons."

      If the divergence time of OWM and apes based on the fossil record is actually 35 My, to reconcile rates and the fossil record wouldn't you need an acceleration of the mutation rates rather than a slowdown?

      Faster rates leads to younger divergence time estimations because at a faster rate you need less time to accumulate the same amount of mutations... no? :)

    1. On 2025-01-20 10:53:31, user Sudarshan GC wrote:

      Very interesting paper. I think several tests are missing like calcium influx assay. Would like to see if increase in calcium concentration in media can help to fold increase the EV production. I would also expect to see the elaboration of precise pathway downstream of Piezo1.

    1. On 2021-04-27 16:54:08, user Leighton Pritchard wrote:

      This is very interesting work. Thank you for sharing it.

      I have a point of confusion. I may be missing something, but I understood that bidirectional/divergent promoters have been recognised for some time in prokaryotes, if not catalogued in depth. For example Beck and Warren (1988, https://mmbr.asm.org/conten... "https://mmbr.asm.org/content/52/3/318.long)") note that "Over 20 [divergent promoters] have been found on the chromosome of E. coli alone," and Rhee et al (1999, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.go... "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC24430/)") describe the divergent ilvYC system. Does this contradict the introduction's statement that there is a consensus view that prokaryotic promoters are unidirectional, and the abstract's note that in all prokaryotes promoters are believed to drive transcription in a single direction?

    1. On 2018-07-10 22:38:02, user Mareen Engel wrote:

      Hi Nick,<br /> I'm sorry for never answering your comment (thanks a lot though & thanks for the note about the Figures). Unfortunately, we don't see the same negative relationship between m6A and mRNA with the final, higher confidence peak set (see also my comment on the updated bioRxiv & the final manuscript version online/linked soon). It seems also very dependent on how the m6A is quantified, thus I am suspecting that (at least here) it may be to a large part an artifact of the normalization of m6A to RNA input.<br /> Sorry for this & please excuse the long delay. Please feel free to contact me for any more discussions about this!

      Best, Mareen

    1. On 2016-02-02 11:08:13, user Robert Sade wrote:

      The revised manuscript has a clarification on pp 25/26 with regard to barrierless folding (Type 0 scenario according to the Energy Landscape Theory), including an additional figure (Fig. 13) on the last page. In addition to these changes there is an additional corollary on page 37 that stems directly from Eq. (A29).

      The framework developed in Papers I and II has been used to analyze the non-Arrhenius behavior of FBP28 WW (Article III): http://biorxiv.org/content/....

    1. On 2020-07-07 11:35:42, user Ludwika Zofia Fortuna wrote:

      Basing on what I read so far I must thank you for no weird text layouts. You can read the paper smoothly and find paragraphs easily. Thank you for your research and I will be waiting for further insights about the significance of Rab46 in endothelial cells functioning ????

    1. On 2025-03-13 13:09:46, user marodon wrote:

      Related to "Somewhat paradoxically, a recent pre-print study demonstrated a small but statistically significant decrease in basal heat sensitivity in both female and male mice conditionally depleted for Penk expression in systemic Tregs. Mechanical thresholds and other sensory modalities were however not examined ". This sentence is not accurate since the preprint had been significantly improved and was published in eLife as a Version of Record (VOR) in August 2024. Various mechanical tests were performed and are shown in a supplementary figure in the VOR. Moreover, mice depleted of Penk in Treg do not show a decrease in basal heat sensitivity but an increase (they are more sensitive @55° than the controls). These results are confirmed by Mendoza et al using the same mouse model. Best regards

    1. On 2020-11-07 09:41:54, user Sebastian Quilo wrote:

      Nice paper in the Biomarker field!<br /> I have a suggestion, it would be better if you add references for the tools used in your work like scikit-learn and PyCM :

      scikit-learn :

      @article{scikit-learn, title={Scikit-learn: Machine Learning in {P}ython}, author={Pedregosa, F. and Varoquaux, G. and Gramfort, A. and Michel, V. and Thirion, B. and Grisel, O. and Blondel, M. and Prettenhofer, P. and Weiss, R. and Dubourg, V. and Vanderplas, J. and Passos, A. and Cournapeau, D. and Brucher, M. and Perrot, M. and Duchesnay, E.}, journal={Journal of Machine Learning Research}, volume={12}, pages={2825--2830}, year={2011} }

      PyCM :

      @article{Haghighi2018, doi = {10.21105/joss.00729}, url = {https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.00729}, year = {2018}, month = {may}, publisher = {The Open Journal}, volume = {3}, number = {25}, pages = {729}, author = {Sepand Haghighi and Masoomeh Jasemi and Shaahin Hessabi and Alireza Zolanvari}, title = {{PyCM}: Multiclass confusion matrix library in Python}, journal = {Journal of Open Source Software} }

    1. On 2019-07-01 19:48:25, user Julius Adler wrote:

      July 2, 2019: some changes to April 18, 2019

      Drosophila Mutants that Are Motile but Respond Poorly to All Stimuli Tested Mutants in RNA splicing and RNA Helices, Mutants in The Boss

      Lar L. Vang and Julius Adler

      The following idea was presented in 2011 in “My Life with Nature” by Julius Adler, p. 60:

      “Recently I conceived a new idea. “The Boss is the thing inside every organism – humans, other animals, plants, microorganisms – that is in charge of the organism. I don’t mean this in any mystical or spiritual or religious sense, but rather I mean it in terms of chemistry and physics. You may think that The Boss is a wild idea, and certainly the evidence for it is poor, but I think it’s true, and at least it’s a hypothesis to be tested.”

      Now we have tested this idea:

      Adler and Vang (2016) and Vang and Adler p. 13, 2018) reported Drosophila mutants that lack all responses to external and internal stimuli at 34 degrees but at room temperature these mutants are not deficient. This means that activity by the Boss can be eliminated at 34 degrees but the activity is still present at room temperature.

      And they (Vang and Adler, 2016) reported a Drosophila mutant that lacks responses to all stimuli tested at both 34 degrees and room temperature. That indicates that this mutant lacks behavioral action by The Boss.

      (It must be admitted that the defects in these mutants were caused by defects in The Boss.)

      What is The Boss? It is a mechanism that acts as described in Figure 10 of Adler, 2016:

      https://uploads.disquscdn.c... https://uploads.disquscdn.c...

      Fig. 10 of Adler, 2016

      The idea that each organism has something in control of the organism is novel. Before this, it was believed that each organism has properties that are largely independent of each other. Now it is suggested that all the properties are controlled by a single factor, The Boss, which directs both the interior and the outside of the organism. The Boss is to be found in humans, other animals, plants, and microorganisms. The evidence for this idea is incomplete.

      Adler J (2011) My life with nature. Ann Rev Biochem 80 42-70.

      Adler J (2016). A search for The Boss: The thing inside each organism that is in charge. Anat Physiol Biochem Int J Vol.1, 2016.

      Adler J, Vang LL (2016) Decision making by Drosophila flies. bioRxiv March 24, 2016.

      Vang LL, Adler J (2018) Drosophila mutants that are motile but respond poorly to all stimuli tested: Mutants in RNA splicing and RNA helices, mutants in The Boss. bioRxiv October 1, 2018.

    1. On 2016-07-10 18:27:20, user Ganesh Shelke wrote:

      hi, One quick question regarding the CD63-Luciferase localisation in cells . Do you think the CD63 +ve EVs isolated from affinity purification comes exclusively from MVBs or can be from membrane budding (Micro vesicles) as they are located both in endo-membranes and cell membrane ??

    1. On 2019-10-18 16:56:56, user Stuart Hameroff MD wrote:

      It's probably the other way around. The latest work on anesthetic action (see Wiki page 'Theories of general anesthetic action' suggests anesthetics dampen high frequency oscillations in microtubules which then slows EEG.

    1. On 2020-08-14 13:16:31, user GraemeTLloyd wrote:

      Hi Jorge. FYI, Claddis now performs AIC tests with the (renamed) Claddis::test_rates() function and these are likely preferable to an LRT. (Try installing version 0.6.0 from GitHub if you want to play with this.)

    1. On 2021-01-20 02:07:12, user Filip Fratev wrote:

      It is not so collegial to not cite previous studies on the topic and to present the results in a way that make the impression that this is the first in silico study about these mutations. Furthermore, it is not clear on the basis of which method these conclusions were drawn, just higher flexability? I can't see any numbers. There are also elementary questions such as why SB14 FF, which creates much larger fluctuations, and not SB19 FF was used? <br /> There are many ambiguities and for me this is a routine study.

    1. On 2023-03-24 23:10:53, user Akshaya Jayakarunakaran wrote:

      Hi! Thank you so much for your submission of your paper. The language was very clear and extremely easy to understand for individuals that are not familiar with the field. The employment of xenografts was great. Personally, I was not familiar with the technique and learnt a lot about it through reading your paper. Furthermore, I thought your employment of controls was great and very appropriate. It served well to verify the reliability of experiments. It also serves well to help analyze the experimental data in relation to the control.

      The some of the things that could be improved are:

      Personally, I felt Figure 3 and 4 could be combined because they seem to be conveying the same thing. <br /> The plot in Figure 2 is a bit unclear and I would prefer a box and whisker plot to convey the data better.

      Again, this was a great paper and we really enjoyed reading it. Thank you for your scientific contribution.

    1. On 2017-11-15 06:03:48, user Andreas Hejnol wrote:

      Title "Placozoans are eumetazoans related to Cnidaria"... Placozoans can be replaced with ANY clade or species in the Animal Tree of Life... So this title does not contain any information... I suggest to change it. I will comment on the EvoDevo part in a separate email to you Chris (and Gonzalo).

    1. On 2019-06-18 15:44:59, user Robert Flight wrote:

      The presence of multiplicative error is a large part of the reason -omics data are often log or some other transform applied before doing *almost* anything with it, if the person working with the data is aware of these issues.

      Given the difficulties in working with the multiplicative error data (as evidenced by some of the very hairy derivations and equations by the authors), I would be very curious to know how the additive correction applied to log-transformed data behaves compared to the full additive + multiplicative correction.

    1. On 2024-08-08 08:28:33, user Ashleigh Shannon wrote:

      AUTHORS COMMENT / UPDATE <br /> 21 June 2024

      Part of this work, describing the inhibition of both the NiRAN and RdRp domains by the guanosine analogue 5’-triphosphate AT-9010 has now been published in Nature Communications ( http://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-28113-1)11 "http://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-28113-1)1") . This includes the structural characterization of the mechanism of inhibition at both active-sites, which importantly revealed that the SARS-CoV-2 NiRAN domain contains a guanine-specific pocket. This has now been confirmed in other studies 2,3, and represents a promising avenue for future drug development studies.

      Following several contradictory reports on the ability of the NiRAN to NMPylate different cofactor proteins (4–6), we have now carried out additional analysis on the protein-priming activity and NMPylation specificity. This has revealed that our nsp8 product is labeled at the primary amine of a non-native glycine residue, present at the N-terminus of the expression construct (following cleavage with TEV protease), and negating the biological relevance of these findings. Surprisingly, removal of this single residue, exposing the true N-terminal alanine, eliminates all labeling and protein-primed activity, stressing the importance for using proteins with native N- and C- termini. Of note, the current publication does not reflect these new findings, but instead has been left as the initially submitted manuscript.

      Later studies have now revealed nsp9 to be the primary target for both NMPylation5,7, and RNAylation8 – a conclusion that we fully agree with.

      With the exception of our finding that nsp8 can be used to prime-synthesis, albeit by a non-native residue, there was no other evidence for protein-priming until recently. In October, 2023, Schmidt et al., published the finding that nsp9 is covalently linked to the 5' end of positive- and negative-sense RNA produced during SARS-CoV-2 infection9. This linkage was found to be regulated by its interaction with the host protein, staphylococcal nuclease domain-containing protein 1 (SND1), which was found to specifically recognize the 5’ end of negative-sense RNA and be important for viral RNA synthesis. Although it is highly frustrating to have spent several years focused on the wrong protein, this finding supports the notion that protein-priming is occurring in CoVs, and opens up a plethora of options for further mechanistic and structural studies.

      Of note, Schmidt et al. also showed that nsp9-linkage on the (-)sense strand mapped roughly between the genome and poly(A) tail. Intriguingly, we also found a similar specificity for this region. Here we show that the SARS-CoV mRTC (nsp12-nsp7-nsp8) can initiate synthesis through a de novo, NiRAN independent pathway, through the synthesis of a pppGpU primer. This dinucleotide is complementary to the last two nucleotides of the SARS-CoV-2 genome, located precisely at the genome-poly(A) junction. De novo initiation was found to directly compete with the (artificial) nsp8-poly(U) protein-primed synthesis. This shows that the poly(A) tail and 3’ genomic RNA sequence elements guide the positioning of the mRTC to the true 3’-end of the genome.

      The specific details behind initiation of RNA synthesis, including the role of SND1 and potential coordination between protein-priming and/or de novo induction remains to be studied. Synthesis initiation, and the precise role of the NiRAN therefore appears to be a complicated story, which remains to be fully elucidated.

      Ashleigh Shannon and Bruno Canard

    1. On 2025-10-14 20:45:37, user Yu Lee wrote:

      This paper, as well as the previous papers of M. P. Nikitin, is based on the concept of DNA commutation, where affinities for interactions are calculated using custom NUPACK scripts developed by the authors. Could the authors deposit the developed code along with the new paper, since it is central to this manuscript as well as to their previous publications?

      The previous papers, which also relied on the same NUPACK scripts, did not include the code despite Nature’s code availability guidelines.<br /> https://doi.org/10.1038/s41557-022-01111-y

    1. On 2018-03-14 20:23:07, user Mick Watson wrote:

      Looks great!

      Be wonderful to see a comparison of the genomes within to the 913 we recently released: https://www.nature.com/arti... - see https://datashare.is.ed.ac.... for the data

      Also 99 MAGs from the moose rumen (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.go... "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28731473)") and the 8000 MAGs from Parks et al included a good number of rumen MAGs (https://www.nature.com/arti... "https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-017-0012-7)")

      Looking forward to working to reading this properly!

    1. On 2017-02-14 18:57:11, user Casey Bergman wrote:

      After posting this preprint, we were contacted by Lyudmila Zakharenko who pointed out a possible alternative for the P' phenotype in Ukrainian populations being due to the effects of elevated temperature in the GD assay. The first author's lab is now in the process of replicating GD assays to verify the GD phenotypes of the Ukrainian populations reported here. As a consequence, we have rewritten this manuscript to report only the comparison of genomic P-element predictions with GD phenotypes in the three worldwide populations from North America, Africa and Europe. A preprint of the revised manuscript can be found here: http://biorxiv.org/content/...

    1. On 2020-10-30 20:55:30, user Angel Ni wrote:

      Beautiful paper! I thoroughly enjoyed reading this because of how well thought out the methods were. For example, the cell lines were very good fits for the specific experiments they were involved in. HEK293A was a model for kidney cells, Huh7 for liver cells, and Caco-2 for intestinal cells.

      I would have appreciated a figure in the introduction that outlines the role of Mpro in virus replication. After a quick search on Google, I was unable to find any descriptions that covered the mechanisms relevant to this paper in good detail. In addition, it would be nice to have a figure with the structures of all the inhibitors that were studied. This would allow easy and direct comparison.

      This paper makes a strong case for the therapeutic potential of SARSCoV2 Mpro inhibitors with ketoamide warheads and cyclic structures. I look forward to seeing further research in this area.

    1. On 2017-11-27 16:24:33, user Emily Stephen wrote:

      Also, a nitty-gritty question: your permutation-style shuffling procedure to test the significance of a traveling wave randomly permutes the electrode locations within each cluster 1000 times. But e.g. clusters with 4 electrodes will only have 24 possible permutations (4p4), correct? If so, how would this affect your estimated sampling distribution and/or the performance of the hypothesis test?

    1. On 2023-07-28 09:04:13, user arpitmathur wrote:

      I would like to point out that in carrying out survival analysis, authors divided patients into two categories top 40% and bottom 40% . There is a literature from medical statsitics that says that there should be no division of patients into groups. Rather regression should be used for survival analysis purpose.

      https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.go...

    1. On 2024-05-29 06:50:45, user theNiessingLabs wrote:

      The authors show in Figures 3 - 4 and in Table 2 in silico-docking studies with an alphafold2-model of PURA as template. In this model, PUR-repeat III is shown as a monomer with an awkward-looking fold. The authors use this docking to suggest a direct interaction between PURA and GLUT1. <br /> Unfortunately, the authors seem to ignore that PUR repeats do not exist as single, monomeric repeats but require dimerization. For repeat III of Drosophila PURA, a high-resolution structure of its homodimeric domain has been reported already in 2016:<br /> https://elifesciences.org/a...<br /> PDB-ID: 5FGO<br /> For repeat III of the human PURA (as used in this study), more recently the homodimeric high-resolution domain structure has also been published:<br /> https://elifesciences.org/a...<br /> PDB-ID: 8CHW<br /> Considering these experimental structures, Figures 3-4 and Table 2 refer to unphysiological folds. As a result, conclusions drawn from these figures have to be considered as entirely wrong.

    1. On 2019-03-21 15:15:48, user Howard Salis wrote:

      Overall, this is a well-written & intriguing manuscript with a substantial & diverse collection of supporting data that will add to the ongoing debate over the translational ramp hypothesis. However, I have some simple questions, and even though no one really uses the comments section in bioRxiv, I'll take the dive.

      1. In the abstract, the authors state that "The observed difference [in protein abundance] is not dependent on tRNA abundance, efficiency of translation initiation, or overall mRNA structure." but in the main text, they write "In summary, we show that the efficiency of protein synthesis in addition to overall mRNA structure and codon content is strongly dependent on the nucleotide sequence positions 7-15 and the resulting protein amino acid positions 3-5." These two sentences are quite dissimilar, and only the conclusion in the main text is supported by the authors' data.

      2. The stability of mRNA structures located solely within the N-terminal CDS sequence are known to alter the rate of translation initiation and protein synthesis rate [https://academic.oup.com/na...]. Further, if the first 15 nucleotides of a CDS are altered, it's very possible that those nucleotides will base pair with the 5' UTR sequence to form additional mRNA structures that will inhibit translation initiation [https://www.nature.com/arti...]. The effect sizes are very large; the presence of one stable mRNA structure (dG = -15 kcal/mol) within 15 nucleotides of the start codon will repress translation initiation by about 850-fold.

      3. The authors mention mRNA structure several times, but the manuscript's main text does not include any mRNA structure calculations that test whether their presence & stability could explain the differences in protein abundance or expression level data.

      4. Whenever a physical phenomenon has multiple overlapping mechanisms [as is very likely the case here], it's always difficult to design experiments that clearly distinguish the mechanisms and quantify their effects separately. The authors' in vitro data using FRET and mis-charged tRNAs are a step in the right direction towards sussing out these mechanisms. But it's important to place these additional measurements in a systems-wide perspective. For example, if the FRET measurements report an increase in the abundance of ribosome initiation complex, then the cause of that increase could be either an increase in the rate of ribosome recruitment/initiation OR a slow down in the transition to the processive elongation phase. Either cause would have the same effect. This can be clearly shown by deriving a simple kinetic model of the process.

      5. The measurements using mischarged tRNAs are great, though error bars and an F-test are absolutely needed to determine whether the differences are significant. Protein abundances are varying by >100-fold, but the measurements of translation processivity are changing by 1.4-fold. Again, multiple mechanisms could be responsible for the overall large change in protein expression levels, and amino acid content in the ramp has the potential to contribute, but it's important to quantify its magnitude.

      6. If there are special mRNA and amino acid motifs that specifically alter translation elongation rates, why would they only have an effect when present within the first 5 codons? The ribosome very quickly transitions to a processive state after initiation. Is the argument that a still-bound initiation factor is responsible for mediating these effects, which are lost after the initiation factor dissociates? If so, that would require some proof!

    1. On 2025-05-07 00:43:31, user Young Cho wrote:

      General comments

      The study provides a great baseline using a novel perspective that connects carcinogenesis to observed epigenetic changes and can benefit future understanding of the effects of formaldehyde exposure. References are effective and well-executed. The title is appropriate. The Abstract appropriately summarizes the study, but could benefit from mentioning the ambiguous response to dose concentrations. Organization and language are appropriate and effective. While the study has great potential to benefit the field, statistical analysis between groups and figures are of particular concern and prevent publication of the study in a prestigious journal.

      Introduction

      The introduction clearly reports the gaps in knowledge of FA exposure carcinogenesis which the study hopes to bridge. Current studies relating to the topic are referenced. Objectives are clearly stated. Lacking some justification for the methodology.

      Methods

      The methods are well explained, reproducible and appropriate as they provided a representative cell line to study the effects of FA. Furthermore, the use of LC and tandem MS/MS allowed for precise peptide separation and identification. The simplicity of this experimental design allows for the responses to the treatments to be clearly identified, and creates the baseline for further examination into FA exposure carcinogenesis. Statistical analysis methods need revision.

      Results:

      Thorough explanation of figures and results. For comparison between groups, and particularly for PTM-combined peptide fragments, additional statistical tests may be required for proper analysis since PTM-combined groups may not be independent.

      Figures clearly present the data and support for the researcher’s conclusions. They are effective in showing comparisons between different sites and effects of formaldehyde exposure. Because most figures are box-and-whisker plots, color selection of each figure could be more intentional. The number and sizes of the figures is excessive, particularly since some data described in the figures are not included in the discussion.

      Discussion

      The discussion extensively interprets the results using epigenetic cancer markers described by previous studies, but is overly focused on the application of observed epigenetic changes directly to cancer, potentially overlooking confounding effects between the two. Strengths of the study are briefly discussed. Despite mention of exogenous vs endogenous FA exposure in both the abstract and introduction, there is little discussion of how the results of the current study elucidate the DNA adduct hypothesis. Generally, the discussion also lacks possible future directions and assertion of the valuable baseline that the study provides for future research. Weaknesses of the study are also not thoroughly discussed. Increased suppression in response to the lower concentration groups should also be further discussed, possibly with the suggestion that further studies should focus on a wider range of concentrations and exposure durations. The study could also benefit from discussion of possible differences caused by cell line origins when comparing epigenetic markers from other studies.

      Detailed Comments:

      Introduction

      Given that lung cancers were not mentioned to be associated with FA exposure, what is the justification for using the BEAS-2B cell line?<br /> Methods

      Section 2.6: The student’s t test assumes a normal distribution of data while non-parametric one-way ANOVA does not. In addition to the non-parametric one-way ANOVA, consider a non-parametric comparison such as Dunn’s test with correction instead of the student’s t-test.<br /> Results

      Section 2.1: Table 1 and Table 2 take up a large amount of space, and fragments with large p values serve little purpose. Additionally, in the following fragment, “KSAPSTGGVKKme1PHRme140” in Table 1, the methylation notation is not subscripted for K37.<br /> Section 3.5: The X and Y axis of Figure 6 are inverted compared to all other figures in the study.<br /> Section 3.7: Figure 8 is too large and has too many included datapoints. In groups with smaller variance, the color is barely visible of each treatment is barely visible. Consider limiting the scope of the graph since there is no comparison between groups.

    1. On 2019-09-19 08:55:20, user H. Etchevers wrote:

      This is exciting work and I congratulate the authors on the technical and also presentational prowess. In addition, I played around with their online tool which was wonderful. A few days later, there was an update of my Kaspersky Antivirus definitions and reputation files, and suddenly(since week 38 2019), and ironically (given the name similarity) the website is flagged as a "risk". This is reproduced on their online check: by entering http://kasperlab.org/mouseskin into the tool here: https://virusdesk.kaspersky... . I've submitted it for further examination as a likely false positive, since EVERY other site declares it clean on https://www.virustotal.com and others, but it is blacklisted with Kaspersky FYI.

    1. On 2020-11-21 05:12:35, user Areli Lopez wrote:

      I thoroughly enjoyed reading this paper and learning more about sleep regulation and particularly sleep homeostasis. I thought that the presentation of data and results progressed nicely by first establishing normal calcium activity in LPO neurons and then transitioning into how the deletion of NMDA receptors affects these normal conditions. I felt that the inclusion of both sleep deprivation and sleeping medication provided a nice holistic approach to analyzing all aspects of the potential effects of the GluN1 deletion on sleep. However, I would have liked to see a bit more organization and clarity in the figures. For example, in figure 2E, the two plots showing Mean GCaMP6s signal were not labelled, even though they represented distinct conditions (EMG and delta power). Additionally, the choice of colors on these plots are less than ideal due to the similarity of the lime and cyan used for NREM and REM, respectively. I would suggest using a color with greater contrast for REM points, such as orange. Figure 3D could use better organization as well, as the use of shading to distinguish light period versus dark period plots is not very effective and clear labels would better fit the data. An additional recommendation would be to make the legend in figure 3C larger, as both the line icons and text itself are very small and difficult to see. Overall it is a well-written paper, but could use a few adjustments particularly with the presentation of figures.

    1. On 2016-02-18 18:48:43, user John Smith wrote:

      The full version of this paper was published in Frontiers in Neuroscience on 27th Jan 2016 as "Identification of Vulnerable Cell Types in Major Brain Disorders Using Single Cell Transcriptomes and Expression Weighted Cell Type Enrichment"

    1. On 2017-01-15 01:04:34, user Christopher Mason wrote:

      Very interesting, and thanks for posting.<br /> Since most scRNA-seq, GTEx, and TCGA data is polyA-primed and not enriched for ncRNAs, it seems the model would benefit even further from leveraging some ribo-depleted data sets to find more composite measurements Like here: http://www.nature.com/nbt/j..., and others coming soon. There are, after all, more ncRNAs than protein-coding RNAs, and this likely means your model could get >2x as good with more data, especially since ncRNAs (not to mention circRNAs and other RNAs) are very tissue- and stage-specific.

    1. On 2018-12-07 05:53:11, user Michael Inouye wrote:

      Thank you all for a really engaging paper! It's generated a lot of interest and was widely read in my lab so we decided to do a review together. Hopefully our comments are useful, so I've pasted them below:

      Overall comment: Population stratification is a form of confounding, i.e. we cannot easily disentangle whether the apparent genetic association with phenotype is (i) due to true aetiology (ii) due to simply tagging different sub-populations/ancestry with different 'environment'/lifestyle factors that are unrelated to aetiology or (iii) a mix of both. Further, if we see an association of polygenic scores with principal components or ancestry, this does not *in itself* (without further analysis/evidence) mean that it is only confounding by ancestry and not true aetiological signal.

      MAJOR COMMENTS:

      1. It's known that polygenic scores exhibit geographical variation, which can be due to genotype frequencies and/or the per-variant polygenic score weights being correlated with geography/ancestry. If the polygenic score is confounded, the target dataset has population structure correlated with the phenotype, and there is sample overlap between training and target dataset, it becomes very difficult to disentangle. Simulations under various scenarios could provide some more concrete insight here.

      2. Overlapping samples are a major and well-known biasing factor (overfitting). Please clarify if the first part of the Results (pg 5 - 14; Tables 1, 2; Figures 1-4) pertaining to the GIANT-based polygenic score(s) include overlapping FINRISK samples in the derivation and target datasets (N~2,300). The removal of all overlapping samples is necessary for eliminating this bias, and it is common to do this before performing subsequent analysis. Pg 15, paragraph two appears to try to address this point (or estimate how much overlapping samples are biasing the analysis) but is not really persuasive: increasing the overlap doesn't tell one how much the (unquantified) existing overlap is biasing the results. Our experience is that small overlaps can lead to (sometimes substantially) inflated effect size estimates. Without more in-depth investigation of the effects of the overlapping samples it is not possible to properly assess whether the inflation in prediction is primarily due to population stratification or sample overlap.

      3. It is common for polygenic score prediction analyses to adjust for genetic PCs (typically the top 3-10 or more PCs). From pg. 27 "Phenotypic differences predicted by PS", it seems that the when the scores are used to predict the phenotype, there is an adjustment for sex, age, and age^2 (and BMI for WHR). It's not clear whether also adjusting for PCs *in the target dataset* (FINRISK) eliminates/reduces the apparent stratification exhibited by GIANT-height (i.e., the 3.5cm west-east difference). This is important because if we can adjust the score with PCs and fix the issue, that would reduce the severity of this problem and we could use existing scores. If even adjusting for PCs doesn't remove stratification, this would potentially require deriving new scores which is more difficult (especially if only summary statistics are available).

      4. Besides population stratification and sample overlap, another potential reason for the apparent large estimates for height by the GIANT height score is that GIANT is a meta-analysis of different cohorts, each of which could possibly have had slightly different QC or imputation, and/or different adjustment for potential structure. Since the contributing cohorts are typically of different ancestry, these small differences could accumulate and indirectly contribute to further confounding with ancestry. In comparison, UKB is more ethnically homogeneous and genotyped+imputed all in essentially the same way. This may help explain why the GIANT height score shows such extreme differences between east and west Finland (in absolute terms) and why even selecting SNPs with P>0.5 still has some association with height (but not for UKB).

      MINOR COMMENTS:

      1. Are all the scores approximately normally distributed in FINRISK or could there be outliers that could potentially exacerbate the apparent east-west difference?

      2. On a practical level, some things that could be done to assess score for stratification:

      3. As the preprint suggests, generating scores from SNPs unlikely to be associated with the phenotype (e.g. P>0.5) is a useful negative control (assuming no sample overlaps). This seems to work well for the UKB-height summary stats. This could also be performed multiple times to form a null distribution to which the ‘real’ score would be compared.
      4. As the preprint suggests, checking the correlation of the scores with PCs. If the correlations are high, this should warrant further investigation.
      5. Adjusting the score PCs in the target dataset and assessing whether the association with the phenotype is substantially changed (usually attenuated) as a result. Another alternative is using (generalised) linear mixed models in the target dataset to adjust for relatedness/structure, though this can become difficult for a large dataset (e.g. UKB).

      6. It has been pointed out by others that Finland is actually genetically heterogeneous relative to other even European populations (e.g. PC1 vs PC2 in 1000 Genomes). In addition to the above, it would be useful to know how the relative heterogeneity of the Finnish population affects the conclusions.

      7. The manuscript doesn't say that *all* scores are biased/confounded, however it's important to acknowledge this and make clear that polygenic score analyses need to be acutely cognizant of these issues. The preprint ultimately shows the importance of evaluating each score for population structure, as different scores can show substantially different levels of stratification on the same dataset.

    1. On 2020-03-24 15:57:40, user Brice Curtin wrote:

      Can you comment on why the lactam appears as a hemiaminal in the crystal structure? This is shown in Fig. 2 where the geometry is not that of a lactam, and the 3D structure wouldn't match the covalently-modified structure in Extended Data Figure 1c. This change in structure was not discussed in the text.

    1. On 2025-04-21 07:14:30, user Rainer Spanagel wrote:

      Congratulations on your outstanding multi-site study. This work exemplifies exactly what preclinical research requires to advance knowledge in a replicable and more translational manner.

      I would like to bring to your attention our previous research, which reported similar findings. In Meinhard et al. (NPP, 2000 doi: 10.1038/s41386-020-0694-z.), we investigated the effects of psilocybin on alcohol relapse behavior and found that while there were some acute effects, there were no long-lasting effects beyond 24 hours, regardless of dose, treatment schedule, or sex. This study began as a multi-institutional investigation into the effects of psilocybin on rat behavior, funded by the EU in 2019-2022 ( https://www.neuron-eranet.eu/projects/Psi-Alc/) "https://www.neuron-eranet.eu/projects/Psi-Alc/)") . Following the lack of long-term effects observed with psilocybin, we transitioned our focus to R-ketamine. We recently published a multi-institutional preclinical randomized controlled trial (referred to as a pre-RCT) in Meinhardt et al. (NPP, 2025 doi: 10.1038/s41386-025-02071-w.) with R-ketamine.

    1. On 2016-09-22 12:22:59, user Christoph von Beeren wrote:

      Thanks Joe and Munetoshi for this excellent piece of work. I enjoyed <br /> reading the article, fantastic example of a predictable convergent <br /> phentotypic evolution. I have some minor comments that I will hand over <br /> to Joe at ICE on paper. <br /> I think one difficulty that I see is the <br /> definition of what a myrmecoid body plan actually is, as you also noted,<br /> this is difficult. There are species with a strong constriction at the <br /> abdomen, species with a weak one, species with one or three petiolate <br /> structures, so this body plan is not easy to define. I think if you show<br /> that "myrmecoids" have a constriction (first few abdomen segments <br /> smaller than later segments) and show this is not the case for the <br /> most-closely related non-myrmecoids, this would strengthen the <br /> definition of what a myrmecoid staphylinid actually is. At the moment <br /> you rely on what other authors have considered to be myrmecoid and on <br /> what you consider to constitute long legs and a constriction. I agree <br /> with you that the beetles you chose have a resemblance to their host <br /> ants, but in very different degrees of perfection. So it would be nice <br /> to come up with an own definition for this study. <br /> I also think a <br /> little piece about the potential selection pressures that acted on army <br /> ant-associated myrmecoids and led to this parallel trait evolution would<br /> be nice. Why does a close ant resemblance increases the beetles fitness<br /> (visual mimicry, tactile mimicry, benefits to have this elongate shape <br /> because of a subterranean life, etc.)? It would also be nice to mention <br /> that many army-ant-associated Aleocharines did not end up with a <br /> myrmecoid body shape-maybe add a discussion on why you think they did <br /> not evolve a myrmecoid body plan would also be useful. That are my first<br /> thoughts after reading. Great article, I can definitely recommend it to<br /> others.

    1. On 2020-01-31 22:20:39, user Hongda Liang wrote:

      Question from a layman: On Line# 123~ 124. " We then successfully isolated the virus (named nCoV-2019 BetaCoV/Wuhan/WIV04/2019)" . Does this mean the nCoV-2019 is also called WIV04? It seems Wuhan Inst. of Virus has used this name (WIV4) in previous years papers.

    1. On 2021-02-28 16:22:37, user Gard W. Otis wrote:

      Note that Archer mostly summarized information obtained by Matsuura and other Japanese researchers; he never observed much directly.<br /> And very importantly, you must read and assimilate Matsuura & Yamane's book on Vespa. It summarizes all earlier findings in well-organized manner.<br /> Finally, why health risks were barely included.<br /> - There is much to be learned from V. velutina in Europe and Korea, numbers of matings by queens, several simulations of habitat matching, etc.

    1. On 2018-08-26 20:57:45, user Matt van der Meer wrote:

      Thank you for the comment! My apologies for the delay in replying – I didn't get an alert that a comment had been posted, so I only just saw this! Our thinking is as follows:

      1) I don’t know of a precedent in the literature suggesting that experience affects replay with a delay (suggestions welcome, of course!). The opposite-side bias we found persisted not only throughout the task and its intertrial rest intervals, but also through the post-task rest period. If experience was driving replay content, its effects would need to be sufficiently delayed as to not show up during these times. My reading of the classic experience effects on replay during sleep and awake states is that its content follows experience rapidly (minutes, or less). I suppose it’s possible that for some reason, on this task or in our hands, the effects of experience are delayed; we didn’t design the experiment to rule that out explicitly, beyond having a post-task recording period. Randomizing the order of food and water restriction across days would be a good way to do that in the future (but tough behaviorally).

      2) Previous day raw behavior (not bias) is indeed positively correlated with current day replay content, as a “delayed-experience” account would predict. However, in terms of raw model fits, motivational state fits the data marginally better than previous day behavior (not bias). In addition, the behavioral bias measure dissociates the experience-driven prediction that biased behavior should lead to more biased replay, from motivational state (no effect of previous day bias). We didn’t find evidence for this bias effect.

      Hope that helps, I’d be happy to discuss this more and hear your thoughts!

    1. On 2018-09-05 18:27:22, user Mike wrote:

      ?Interesting paper and glad to see that someone actually tested to see if vertically ?infected? progeny were able to transmit a virus. However, did the authors actually detect any infectious virus, or did they merely detect some pieces of random RNA?? Do the authors have any explanation as to how they could recover ZIKV RNA from the saliva, but not from the abdomen? Could that RNA be merely a non-infectious piece of RNA?

    1. On 2020-08-31 07:45:28, user Evgeny Bobrov wrote:

      The article title seems misleading to me. It suggest evidence of how open science practices have controbuted to the COVID-19 response. While some changes due to the pandemic are described, the article does not provide evidence of ways in which open science practices have actually contributed to fighting COVID-19. Rather, the focus is on what has happened so far but did not work, and even more on what could be done in the future. These are very important topics to address, but this is not what the title suggests to me.

    1. On 2019-01-12 11:38:43, user Kevin Bermeister wrote:

      Interestingly, "the number of gene mutations yielding predicted HLA-binding peptides showed no significant difference between" mutated and non-mutated Tp53. Did you test whether the each specified predicted peptide was more or less influential for both groups in cytokine, infiltration suppression, infiltration etc.? The data could be helpful for our next set of experiments... https://www.biorxiv.org/con...

    1. On 2016-01-29 17:24:42, user Tomenable wrote:

      According to user Smal from Anthrogenica, Corded Ware sample I1534 / ESP14 was not R1b (he was most likely R1a1a-M198* - https://genetiker.wordpress... ):

      http://www.anthrogenica.com...

      Smal explained - let me cite him:

      Quote:

      "I1534 is not R1b. CTS11468 and many other R1b specific SNPs are negative for this sample.

      I1534 has the following negative R1b SNPs:

      L1349/PF6268/YSC0000231-<br /> CTS2702/PF6099/Z8132-<br /> CTS2703-<br /> L1345/PF6266/YSC0000224-<br /> CTS9018/FGC188/PF6484-<br /> CTS2466/PF6453-<br /> CTS2704/PF6100-<br /> CTS8052/FGC45/PF6473-<br /> L749/PF6476/YSC0000290-<br /> PF6496/YSC0000213-<br /> L1350/PF6505/YSC0000225-<br /> PF6507-<br /> CTS11468/FGC49/PF6520-<br /> CTS12972/FGC52/PF6532-

      CTS11468 is a mutation from “G” to “T”. All R1b1a2 (R-M269) have “T” in this position. I1534 has 1”G” read.

      I am looking at the actual reads from bam files.

      It is easy to explain.

      A difference between Reference Sequence and Sample Sequence can arise in 2 cases

      1) Ancestral (RS) -> Derived (SS) [positive SNP in SS]<br /> 2) Ancestral (SS) -> Derived (RS) [negative SNP in SS]

      If there are no differences between Reference Sequence and Sample Sequence that can mean

      3) Ancestral -> Derived (RS) = Derived (SS) [positive SNP in SS]<br /> 4) Ancestral (RS) = Ancestral (SS) -> Derived [negative SNP in SS]

      Probably you know that Reference Sequence is a mix from the actual R1b-P312 (mainly) and G sequences.

      As a result, the most of R1b1a2 specific SNPs belong to the variant 3. But in case of CTS11468 we see the variant 2.

      However, Mathieson et al have recorded it wrongly as the variant 1."

      End of quote

    1. On 2019-12-11 05:03:42, user Rob Lanfear wrote:

      Hi there,

      I liked your paper and thought it was interesting. I was a little confused, though, by the suggestion that "no study has yet aimed to quantify the loss in assembly quality that is linked to the exclusive use of Nanopore reads during plastome sequencing."

      That's one of the things we do reasonably extensively in the paper you cite just before that:

      https://bmcgenomics.biomedc...

      see e.g. figure 1, the supplementary figures, and the section on 'Long-read-only assembly'.

      I appreciate that you discuss these findings quite thoroughly later in your paper, but I found the initial claim of novelty a bit misleading in light of that.

      Perhaps just in need of some clarification of what you mean in the statement of yours I quoted above.

      Rob Lanfear

    1. On 2021-08-23 15:26:46, user Crap wrote:

      Elimination of flow-through - does the Receptor not breathe?<br /> 50% efficacy study was done only for coughing, and not breathing, in an environment for only filtration through the mask, not taking into account side air flow-through. The study, although controlled, has questionable results at best. <br /> Further, model assumed an open room in calculations - eliminating any barriers, and heat sources for impact on mass transfer volumetric flow.

    1. On 2020-04-08 16:36:30, user Trudy Oliver wrote:

      Very happy to see this large and powerful resource for SCLC community!

      I am admittedly biased, but a key reference not highlighted is that MYC was originally shown to correlate with non-NE fate, drive NEUROD1 expression in an in vivo model, and to promote unique drug sensitivities in vivo in Mollaoglu et al, Cancer Cell, 2017

      https://doi.org/10.1016/J.C...

      MYC Drives Progression of Small Cell Lung Cancer to a Variant Neuroendocrine Subtype with Vulnerability to Aurora… https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1535610816306006#disqus_thread

    1. On 2016-10-28 01:22:57, user tsuyomiyakawa wrote:

      I am curious if qSVA correlates with sample pH, since pH could potentially affect RNA quality. We assume that low pH could be one of the pathology (please see our article that we uploaded here just yesterday; http://biorxiv.org/content/... ) of some psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, instead of an artifact, and, if so, you may want to take it into account for RNA quality correction method.

    1. On 2018-02-27 08:54:42, user Jubin Rodriguez wrote:

      Why use one mgrB primer set for PCR screening/sanger sequencing and use yet another set for the complementation assay? In theory, wouldn't the primer-set from reference 21 work for complementation assay as well or am I missing something fundamental here?

    1. On 2018-03-02 08:12:31, user input@nu wrote:

      This is really amazing work. Finally, you are writing history, our personal history. I am an enthousiast amateur genealogist, living and with my heritage mostly in the Netherlands. My own database/tree contains now about 13.000 individuals. Those are all originally found by myself, so no copy or importing from others. I have a few remarks on the numbers and conclusions in this article.

      1 - migration distance of woman: in my data it emerges that the tradition at marriage was as following: a youngman or woman looks for a partner in a neighbouring town, more often then in his own town. When they marry, the celebration is at the womans town, but they go live in the mans town. In my country the average distance between those towns is about 10km, so this makes the woman migrate 10km on average at marriage, while the man does not migrate. Of course there are many exceptions, or migrations later on, but this was the main model.

      2 - unmarried youngmen, that where not able or not wanting to find a wife where more eager to be "adventurous" in finding a place to work or live. They tend to follow new economical opportunities that brought them to places further away. Unmarried woman however tend to stay local and perform small community serving jobs.

      3 - longevity in relation to genetics: until well in the 20th century, there were many causes of death that could occur "randomly" to everyone, regardless their genetics. Dangers like fire, drowning, animals, and bad living conditions, like inhaling smoke, contaminated water, bad personal hygiene, wrong treatment of illness, neglect of health in general all made the time of death appear more randomly then today. Thus, the role of genetics played a less important role. You could say that today, with the excellent healthcare and geriatrics the role of genetics also is diminished.

    1. On 2020-09-14 07:09:41, user Adriana Schatton wrote:

      Congratulations to this fantastic piece of work! I really appreciate that Palazzo<br /> et al. add some conclusive data to the conflicting area of Drosophila FoxP.

      Using different techniques (the ~2 kb 5’ inter-genetic region as an isoform-unspecific<br /> Gal4 enhancer [see Schatton and Scharff 2017]), we also found FoxP expression in<br /> many parts of the brain (also DCN), optic lobes, VNC and even in the periphery:<br /> the chordotonal organ (unpublished manuscript from my Doctoral thesis 2018).

      While MB expression in flies might be an artifact of non-FoxP enhancers, I doubt that<br /> our antibody and in situ hybridization signals in the MB of bees (honeybees and bumblebees) are an artifact (Schatton and Scharff 2017, Schatton et al. 2018). This seems to be a very sensitive (albeit of course not the only interesting) point: Is FoxP expressed in the MB or not. There is data in 4 papers from 2 labs (Miesenbök, Scharff) in favour of this hypothesis and there is data in 3 papers from 3 labs (Deitcher, Brembs, Schenck) against this hypothesis. Could somebody please solve this problem :-)

      Like you, we also found a developmental effect of FoxP (-expressing neurons in our case) on adult locomotion.

      From all the existing driver lines I really like your approach with the Gal4 insertion into the 8th exon most! This is definitely a Crispr breakthrough! Did you inject the embryos yourself or did you charge a company? Does it actually create a fusion protein, i.e. a Gal4 with a FoxP-tail? Same question for the LexA.

      Did you also raise a fly with the Gal4 insertion in the 7th exon to see the specific effect of IsoA? If IsoB dominates the locomotion phenotype, maybe IsoA is more subtle then? After Mendoza et al. 2014, we actually thought the other way round.

      When it comes to the evidence that your mutant fly does not express any FoxP (p 31), I suggest to show a more informative image (Fig. 7B, 8B) with some background staining (DAPI or nc82) and the same magnification. Fig. 8F is more convincing.

      The Lawton antibody actually binds to an epitope in the 1st exon (starting with the first aa at ATG), so it should actually still detect your super-truncated FoxP-KO, no? In the lower panel of Fig. 7A you write "untranscribed" from exon 3 onwards. Did you insert a terminator sequence to be sure about this? I guess you used a vector with the SV40 terminator or do you know this from RT-PCR or qPCR? It could still be transcribed and even translated into sth. weird.

      Since you did not find any effect on spatial parameters with FoxP-cKO in the DCN, you could silence these neurons with your FoxP-iB-Gal4 driver and UAS-Shi or UAS-tetx. It would not really add new information, since Linneweber showed that already with another driver, but since you have the lines and the paradigm you could prove the hypothesis.

      According to the central complex nomenclature, it should be PB, not PCB.

      It seems that FoxP-IsoB (-RC) mutant flies seem to have more severe problems than only a subtle decision-making phenotype.

    1. On 2020-11-02 20:34:19, user Marco Trabassi wrote:

      I’m not a doctor or researcher but i would like to have contact with you to show a case of tb probably activated by coronavirus that happened on my girlfriend in Italy. Please contact me at marco.trabassi@gmail.com

    1. On 2020-12-18 16:14:26, user Sam Smith wrote:

      Here is a similar study. Also this study was in vitro and I don't know are they going to test the mouth washes/rinses in vivo. Perhaps they didn't publish at a very high-quality journal?<br /> https://www.ijeds.com/journ...<br /> Volume 9, Number 1, January-June 2020<br /> Comparative Analysis of Antiviral Efficacy of Four Different Mouthwashes against Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2: An In Vitro Study

    1. On 2018-09-30 09:49:15, user The Rational Hindu wrote:

      A preliminary critical appraisal of Narasimhan et al 2018 bioRxiv<br /> by Premendra Priyadarshi (published on 29 April 2018)

      It also by implication means that Andaman Islanders and the Hunter-Gatherer Ancient Indians had not diverged genetically or evolved at all in spite of having been separated genetically and spatially for 30,000 to 60,000 years.

      Please read at https://therationalhindu.co...

    1. On 2021-07-10 11:41:20, user David Ron wrote:

      The identification of EIF2AK2 (PKR) as a hub gene is an interesting observation consistent with the idea that in the context of ALS/FTD prevailing levels of eIF2a phosphorylation and activity of its downstream pathway (the Integrated Stress Response) may indeed contribute to dysfunction. But the discussion of parallels with work in flies on a TDP-43 model (reference 102, Kim et al. 2014, PMID: 24336168), fails to take into account the fact that in flies it was EIF2AK3, encoding PERK, whose genetic or pharmacological inactivation led to amelioration of the phenotype (not EIF2AK2 as noted in error here). This does not undermine the operational conclusion that less ISR may be better in ALS/FTD, but it suggests that the driver(s) of enhanced eIF2a phosphorylation in ALS/FTD may be rather diverse and indirect, as the biochemical process that drives EIF2AK2/PKR activity and EIF2AK3/PERK activity are very different.

    1. On 2019-03-21 18:38:41, user richard charles garratt wrote:

      Those of you interested in the Trimble Lab´s latest results may also want to take a look at REPOSITIONING SEPTINS WITHIN THE CORE PARTICLE by Mendonca et al. which was deposited in BioRxiv on the same day. The hexamer is shown to be 267762 rather than 762267.

    1. On 2016-05-15 15:36:13, user stephens999 wrote:

      fascinating stuff. Can you use these ideas to implement efficient versions of other "typical" things one wants to do with an HMM - eg sample from the conditional distribution of the path, or compute probabilities summing over all possible paths (Forwards--Backwards algorithm). Or is it limited to the Viterbi path problem?

    1. On 2025-09-23 15:30:45, user Hari Shankar Gadri wrote:

      This is strong research; however, some sentences lack smooth flow and appear fragmented. In particular, the genome assembly results section has breaks in continuity that affect the overall readability. The linkage map results section also contains grammatical errors and some sentences that disrupt the flow. The methodology section is overly detailed and could be made more concise, while the discussion section is poorly structured and requires significant improvement.

    1. On 2019-07-06 16:46:46, user Valentina Carreno wrote:

      Hi, <br /> I'm analyzing the stage 1 process of the binding score prediction, I'm confused after the first convolution filter how they got the 96x30 matrix. I understand theres 96 filters but where is the 30 from? I'd greatly appreciate if anyone could help me.

    1. On 2022-07-02 08:02:09, user Aram P. wrote:

      Hi all. Thanks for Your work. I want to mention two possible errors in Your paper.<br /> 1. The paper say that Late Armenia cluster do have a partial continuity with Early Armenia cluster. The estimated proportion is 50%. That's looks good. But the other 50% can't be from Steppe as You state. Because Late Armenia cluster is shifted to Near East. So it's more likely that the extra 50% is from South not from Steppe <br /> 2. The other issue I see is the place of modern Kurdish samples on the PCA. Near Lybians.

      Thanks in advance for Your attention.

    1. On 2025-01-27 18:25:14, user Dan T.A. Eisenberg wrote:

      The abstract says, “Repeated qPCR-based measurements of the same DNA extraction yielded ICC values ranging from 0.24 to 0.94”. Keyword searching the document for 0.24 does not reveal that number in the body of the manuscript. The body of the manuscript states, “ICCs of qPCR assays varied widely (range 0.43 to 0.94)”. Table 3 seems to indicate a range of 0.259 to 0.936.

    1. On 2023-09-30 15:41:02, user Prof. T. K. Wood wrote:

      No credible link to persistence here as all toxins, when overproduced, increase persistence (should cite refs showing this). False: persisters poorly understood (should cite only mechanism of 100S ribosome dimerization). No credible evidence of NADase and cell suicide. Should cite 1st report of TAs and phage defense and no evidence of TAs and abortive infection. So usual lack of appropriate citation by Jenal Lab.

    1. On 2020-05-06 11:40:20, user Grimm wrote:

      A general remark re: "we generated a codon-based nucleotide multiple sequence alignment"

      Given the importance of such good ("cleaned") alignments to build on (and for testing the hypothesis put forward in the preprint), maybe you want to consider storing the alignment, as annotated NEXUS (an example) or at least aligned FASTA-format, in a data/file repository.

      Rather than to just state under Data Availability "Sequence data are available from The Global Initiative for Sharing All Influenza Data (GISAID), at https://gisaid.org." Especially, since you cleaned these GISAID data for your analyses.

      Here are some repositories providing a persisent doi (hence, citable) for data dumps (once can put embargoes for later release, i.e. once the paper is published) and without file format restrictions implemented by many journals for their supplements.

      https://figshare.com/<br /> https://datadryad.org/<br /> https://zenodo.org/

    1. On 2020-06-01 23:22:14, user Martin Spacek wrote:

      Came here after watching Konrad's nice World Wide Neuro talk online last week. Interesting idea, and accessible even to (mostly) experimentalists like me.

      In the 5th paragraph in the intro:

      This difference in network state *that* may account for an observed difference in reward, not specifically the neuron’s activity

      Remove the "that"?

    1. On 2023-08-25 16:21:32, user Pawan wrote:

      Hi Sir, Congralutalions. I have one suggestions in figure 5a where you have shown MaHSF11 is cytoplasm and nuclear localization. But figure looks like it a endoplasmic reticulum having high master gain in confocal microscopy. You have to look this figure again with low master gain and ER marker gene (it is available in TAIR). It seems that their is an interaction between ER and nucleus for MaHSF11. Good Luck

    1. On 2020-04-23 13:24:51, user Eric Johnson wrote:

      One major caveat about the "negative" result. Smoking increases circulating IL-6 levels, which in theory would increase TMPRSS2 expression via the AR (and likely explains the observed human results). I strongly suspect TMPRSS2 expression in lung is primarily regulated by IL-6 in the presence of sufficient (non-castrate) androgen levels. Moreover, all the high-risk groups for severe COVID-19 infection possess elevated IL-6 levels. The mouse study desperately needs to be redone with exogenous IL-6 administration. I think it will show a sex discordance then (and markedly increased TMPRSS2 expression as well.

    1. On 2016-08-31 13:10:02, user Aleksey Belikov wrote:

      It would be amazing if somebody could create a simple website that would calculate this index, and possibly other indices that I've proposed, based on Google Scholar data. This way anyone could easily test their usefulness. Please contact me if you are willing to do such a site.

    1. On 2019-04-27 04:18:10, user Andre wrote:

      Admirable attempt to try and understand affective and psychotic pathology however it does little to elucidate the primary causes and that is clearly admitted in the discussion. As many have tweeted "Ever wonder which aspects of brain function are common or specific to affective and psychotic illness? " I felt I should comment on this manuscript. In the end there is too much in the paper that is vague and lacks specificity.

    1. On 2023-03-06 19:55:02, user Elena Cruz wrote:

      • Dosage of MAO-inhibitors not defined in the patient selection, and no discussion of how the genetic MAO model mimics the reduced MAO activity achieved with MAO inhibitors.<br /> • Were the statistics performed on the single cardiomyocyte number or the number of animals. The P values of some comparisons are very close to being non-significant, therefore this should be clarified. If single cardiomyocytes were used, this should be justified since it can significantly inflate the potential for false-positive results.<br /> • Scale bars were inconsistent within figures, and the format of presentation changed.<br /> • No discussion of the PLB pentamers or monomers ? what is the physiological significance?<br /> • Why is there is no western blot confirmation of MAO knockdown? Also, did the expression of the MAO-B isoform stay the same with the MAO-A knockout.<br /> • Why are the results of this study clinically meaningful if MAO-inhibitors are not prescribed much anymore

    1. On 2017-04-02 03:00:25, user BenjaminSchwessinger wrote:

      Hey David,<br /> I guess this will be my second go at PPPR after a 3 years pause. Just upfront I am not an expert in the field of pythobioms at all. I would rather say I am slowly getting sucked into it. Hence some of the comments might be a bit trivial. <br /> Anyway here we go.

      I overall liked the piece yet it missed some focus at points. There are also a couple of typos. <br /> Actually including line number would aid also the PPPR process.

      Typos: <br /> 'arguments about what constitutes what constitutes'<br /> 'exudates differ differ between'<br /> 'a large-scale study by in maize demonstrated that'<br /> 'not be forgotten when discussing microbiomes writ large'

      Abstract:<br /> I would have appreciated if you were more upfront that you omit fungi and other kingdoms from your analysis aka focus on bacteria. <br /> In the abstract you mention the following goals of your paper<br /> '...parameter in regards to phytobiome<br /> membership is the degree to which specialization and coevolution between plant<br /> species and microbial strains structures these communities. In this article, I provide an<br /> broad overview about current knowledge concerning mechanisms enabling adaptation<br /> and specialization of phytobiome communties to host plants as well as the potential for<br /> plants themselves to recruit and cultivate interactions with beneficial microbes. I further<br /> explore the possibility of host-beneficial microbe coevolution and suggest interactions<br /> that could promote the evolution of such close-knit partnerships'

      Only on the second reading I could connect these points to the individual paragraphs. The first time round I kind of missed the connection. Maybe re-pharsing the paragraphs header not as questions and making them more sound like the abstract bit would have helped me.

      Intro:<br /> I didn't understand this sentence.<br /> 'Going forward, incorporation of evolutionary<br /> influences and limitations could help to structure ecological questions about<br /> phytobiomes while also generating new hypotheses to explain patterns of succession.'<br /> Can you elaborate?

      A Note About Phytobiome Membership:<br /> Sounds pretty good and clear.

      Are Microbiomes Specialized to Particular Host Plants?<br /> I might be a bit ignorant here.<br /> '...While most studies are limited by sampling a small number of loci (and usually *just*<br /> 16S rDNA),'<br /> Here I wonder if the resolution of microbiome studies is simply not good enough to study specific host-microbe genotype adaptive evolution. For example Xanthomonads contain many plant species specialized pythopathogens e.g. X. orzyae , X. citri and so on. They are all specific to one host species. This has been figured out because you could easily isolate them as a single species/strain due to high enough numbers during successful plant colonization. Now non-pathogenic bacteria species never appear to reach the same numbers and 16S derived OTUs do not really provide a species/strain resolution. So could it simply be that specific host adapted bacteria 'hide' within the community?

      The final sentence leaves this section a bit hanging in the air. You mention all these mechanisms, yet they are not connected easily to other parts of the review.

      Can Plants Shape Their Own Microbiomes?

      PAMP/MAMP have not been formally defined.<br /> R-genes have not been defined. In general I think you refer to NBS-LRR genes in this case as the term R-genes is agnostic to the protein product it encodes.<br /> What do you mean here with hypersensitive? <br /> 'If R-genes and the hypersensitive broadly affects'<br /> Cell death, sensitivity in general?

      Coevolution Within Microbiomes<br /> 'Such a situation might bias the potential for coevolution between phytobiome and plant host to those species<br /> that have shortest generation times rather than longer lived plants since their<br /> evolutionary response rates are slightly closer to their associated microbes.'<br /> This argument could be also been said for plant-pythopathogen interactions. One might argue that trees should be all dead because pathogens can evolve so quickly they should be able to avoid trees immune system. Obviously this is not the case. Of course also (specialized) pythopathogens have an 'interest' in keeping their host plant species alive (at least for biotrophs). Anyway just a thought.

      This chapter is really a mix between host-microbiome co-evolution and co-evolution between members of the microbiome. The title is hence a bit mis-leading.

      Conclusions<br /> 'Likewise, it remains a possibility that<br /> coevolution has occurred between plants and some of the microbiome members, but<br /> proving such dynamics will be difficult given that many phytobiome members can<br /> survive and thrive outside of host plants and often on a variety of hosts.'<br /> At this point I would suggest to be more careful with this general statement as you are really focusing on bacteria and it might well be very different for fungi.

      I would love to have seen more fungal work here :).

      Do you have any references for Box 1.

      I was unable to follow Figure 2. Might just be me.

      Thanks for putting it our here I learned a lot!

    1. On 2019-02-21 00:21:29, user GuyguyKabundi Tshima wrote:

      I would like to share with you the POSTER 421 on page 224 in the ABSTRACT BOOK MEDICINE AND HEALTH IN THE TROPICS Marseille-France 11-15 September 2005. I have been involved in the study. So, I travelled in the selected DRC cities : Kinshasa, Kimpese, Kisangani, Lubumbashi,... for the study supported by USAID via the school of public health of the University of Kinshasa.<br /> Take home message:<br /> A coverage of 60% ITN in a village may be suitable enough to try and manage the prevailing effects of malaria parasite because it may offer a general protection ( insecticides in mosquito nets may kill mosquito in houses and reduce their number in the community level), but the coverage was very low in the DRC meaning that we were so far to reach the coverage of 60% ITN in each surveyed village. A vaste coverage should drastically reduce the prevailing effects of malaria parasite.<br /> Reference: https://festmih.eu/wp-conte....<br /> IMPORTANT NOTICE: The abstracts included in this book are the proceedings of the Medicine and Health in the Tropics‚ Congress, as provided by the authors, without modification or copy-editing. The organizers of the Congress are, therefore, in no way responsible for abstract presentation or scientific content.<br /> P421<br /> MONITORING NET COVERAGE FOR MALARIA CONTROL IN THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO<br /> BOBANGA L.T.2, WOLKOM A.3, HAWLEY W.3, BEACH R.3, DOTSON E.3, TSHEFU K.A.4, MULUMBA M.P.2, KABUYA W.1, MWAMBA R.1, GIKAPA J.6, TSHIMA K.2<br /> 1. Basics DRC, KINSHASA, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO<br /> 2. Service of parasitology, Kinshasa School of Medecine, KINSHASA, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO<br /> 3. Division of Parasitic Diseases, Centers of diseases control and prevention, ATLANTA GA, UNITED STATES<br /> 4. Kinshasa school of public health, KINSHASA, REPUBLIC DEMOCRATIC OF THE CONGO<br /> 5. School of medecine, KINSHASA, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO<br /> 6. Santé Rurale(SANRU), KINSHASA, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO<br /> Background.<br /> In DRC, malaria is endemic and a significant source of morbidity and mortality. In 2001, DRC endorsed Abuja Declaration and the National Malaria Control Program (PNLP) initiated to protect children and pregnant women and to reduce poverty in DRC . Objectives are 60% Household with at least one ITN, 60% children sleeping under ITN and 60% Pregnant Women sleeping under ITN. With some partners the ministry of Health are implementing ITN in some health zones for more than 1 year. Differents distribution approaches used by partners. Than evaluation of these appears necessary.<br /> Objectives.<br /> To evaluate coverage and equity of distribution.To identify factors influencing use of net, and strengths and weakness of different programmatic approaches.<br /> Methodology.<br /> Surveys Conduct community-based surveys in 9 Health Zones (Kinshasa, Mbuji Mayi, Tshikaji, Pawa, Kisangani, Kimpese, Lodja, Vanga and Lubumbashi) Interviews and documentary review Health zones responsible interviewed.<br /> Results.<br /> ITN household possession: 14-49%. Proportion of pregnant women using ITN: 5-49%. Proportion of children sleeping under ITN: 5- 36%. Malaria prevention is the principal factor influencing ITN use preceding nuisance. Cost is the principal barrier to ITN acquisition.<br /> Conclusion.<br /> Different partners use different approaches. Distribution is not equitable in different groups. Coverage in progress in DRC but new consensus is needed between PNLP and partners.

    1. On 2021-11-25 10:34:24, user Pedro Sánchez-Sánchez wrote:

      Cool method! Will take a deeper look in the future :D

      Just if it helps... I think the visualization of figure2 results would be clearer if the scale is the same for every violin plot!

    1. On 2022-04-11 16:37:49, user Leslie Kay wrote:

      This is a review I posted on Qeios, thinking it was biorXiv asking me for the review. (Aside: Can someone explain to me what Qeios is, and how it's related to open access?)

      This paper tests the hypothesis that the olfactory bulbectomy (OBx) model of major depressive disorder (MDD) is caused by a lack of OB gamma band oscillatory input to the limbic system. OBx is a catastrophic surgery accompanied by significant blood loss and requires weeks of recovery. This leads to a confound with neurodegeneration. The current paper used DREADDs to silence the OBs bilaterally and chronically for several weeks. Additionally, they used short term silencing and cancellation / enhancement of gamma oscillations in an LPS model of MDD.

      Several findings support the hypothesis that it’s loss of OB input to the limbic system that causes the depressive phenotype. There are some differences dependent on the type of silencing. The open field test (OFT) is the gold standard for OBx depression, with hyperactivity and avoidance of the center the classic behaviors indicative of MDD. With chemogenetic silencing, animals avoid the center but are not hyperactive, and they do not exhibit anhedonia. Short term silencing does the opposite - anhedonia but not OFT hyperactivity/center avoidance. These opposite results are interesting and may help get at different mechanisms for anhedonia and anxiety in the OBx model.

      The authors use closed-loop stimulation locked to the gamma bursts in the OB to determine whether gamma burst activity in the PC reduces depressive symptoms. In the LPS model of MDD, they stimulated to either enhance or cancel out gamma transmission to PC from OB. Enhancing gamma reduced depressive symptoms in LPS, and blocking gamma by stimulating in antiphase with the OB gamma did not reduce symptoms. The authors conclude that loss of gamma is the cause of OBx depression.

      I am not sure I agree 100% with their conclusions, even though I have no substantive criticisms with the methods and results. Amplifying gamma is sufficient to reduce symptoms, but does canceling it out tell us that it is gamma per se that causes the antidepressant effect? Canceling out gamma does stimulate the fibers going in to the PC but what does the antiphase stimulation do exactly to the PC? Are the same number of action potentials produced, or is the antiphase stimulation doing something fundamentally different to the PC inputs?

      For the rest of my comments, I need to tell a story, one which I shared with Gyuri the other day. I reminded him of our conversation years ago, when I discussed the idea that OBx depression is due to loss of OB input to the PC and the rest of the limbic system. I envisioned a similar experiment to this one. A few years later we met again at Walter Freeman’s Festschrift in Tucson, the day after Walter had passed away. We discussed the idea again and I told him we were working on it. We never got anywhere with what we tried and Gyuri rightly went ahead. No hard feelings at all, and I am really glad that you all did such a great job on this.

      I think there is a crucial piece missing though, on the provenance of this idea, and it comes from Walter. I shared with Gyuri way back when we first spoke about this idea one of Walter’s little-known papers, a 1968 J Neurophys article “Effects of surgical isolation and tetanization on prepyriform cortex in cats.” This paper was published the same year as the Becker and Freeman paper cited in this report. While the Becker and Freeman paper shows that PC activity changes when the olfactory bulb is removed, the single authored 1968 paper gets at its cause.

      The origin of the idea comes from Walter Freeman, as most good ideas in olfaction do. In the 1968 paper, he bulbectomized cats and showed that a normal shock stimulus to the remaining LOT no longer induced the normal oscillatory evoked potential in the PC – there was a single peak in voltage dying off after one cycle. Two hypotheses were considered, 1) the OB drives the oscillation in the PC, when the LOT is stimulated it produces an oscillatory evoked response in the OB, which drives the same response in the PC, and 2) the OB input is necessary for the PC to produce an oscillation.

      The second hypothesis was the one favored by his results. He replaced the missing OB with tetanic 200Hz low level stimulation of the stump of the LOT and then stimulated with the normal larger shock stimulus during a pause in the tetanic stimulation. Et voila, the oscillatory evoked potential was reinstated in the PC. This relatively obscure paper showed an important role for the OB – it provides abundant excitatory drive to the rest of the system, keeping everything in the right dynamic range. These results were replicated for the entorhinal cortex by Kurt Ahrens (Ahrens and Freeman, Brain Research 2001).

      The rescue of depressive behavior with gamma enhancement in the LPS model in the current study is intriguing, and the cancellation effect of the antiphase stimulation is compelling. Would the same type of stimulation rescue a silenced olfactory bulb? If it does not, does this mean that different mechanisms are at play for different models of depression? The methods used here may be able to make sense of the mechanisms and usefulness of different models of depression for different types of treatment studies. Already the difference in behavioral effects among the several methods post some very interesting questions.

      I appreciate the space to tell Walter’s story and the format of biorXiv that allows public discourse about research reports.

    1. On 2025-05-19 09:10:53, user Thomas REHER wrote:

      This preprint has now been published in Agronomy for Sustainable Development (2025), Volume 45, Article number 25, under the title:<br /> "Agrivoltaic cultivation of pears under semi-transparent panels reduces yield consistently and maintains fruit quality in Belgium."<br /> The final version is available at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13593-025-01019-0 <br /> DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13593-025-01019-0

    1. On 2018-01-23 19:41:06, user Attila Gulyás-Kovács wrote:

      DeepVariant currently calls germline variants from a single sample and a reference genome. How easy would it be to extend DeepVariant for calling somatic variants from a single sample or a tumor-normal sample pair? Suppose training data for somatic variants exists, such that within each sample somatic variant genotypes and their frequencies are known.

    1. On 2018-11-09 14:54:15, user H. Etchevers wrote:

      This article is a very interesting followup to your 2017 work. I suggest that you define what you mean by "deep phenotyping" in the introduction.

      Perhaps in the discussion, you could also suggest an example of how this approach could be applied to clinical manifestations in human mosaic patient populations, eg. with a known hotspot mutation but unique distributions of the mosaic cells.

    1. On 2022-11-15 13:06:04, user Babak Momeni wrote:

      Even though we stand by the accuracy of the data presented in this preprint, in light of new findings in our research, we are no longer confident in our interpretation of the data as presented in this manuscript. Even though our interpretation still holds phenomenologically, we suspect that the mechanisms are different from what we had hypothesized. We advise caution for readers of this preprint and encourage them to reach their own conclusion.

    1. On 2019-11-21 21:40:03, user Keith Hughitt wrote:

      Great article! Few quick thoughts/notes:

      1. In addition to distinguishing between competitive and self-contained methods, there has also been a lot of focus recently on sample-permuting and gene-permuting / single-sample / "pre-ranked" methods.
      2. Similarly, choice of ranking metric also has a significant impact on performance and may be worth considering in future benchmarks.
      3. It may be useful to use consistent colors to refer to each of the methods across the figures.
      4. I know "10" is a nice round number and there are also already about 200 methods out there, so it is not feasible to compare all of them, but fgsea is one other method that I've had a good experience with over the past couple years that has been gaining a lot of traction and may be interesting to include in future benchmarks.
    1. On 2017-09-19 14:26:26, user Joaquín de Navascués wrote:

      Fantastic paper Gabriel et al. May I point out that the methods section contains no information about the midgut experiments (e.g. number of intestines, age, time of Dam induction, whole guts or regions used, etc). Would love to know that :)

    1. On 2023-09-30 14:02:05, user Murali Gopalakrishnan Meena wrote:

      Our preprint has been accepted for publication in PNAS Nexus (https://doi.org/10.1093/pna... "https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad322)"), which is openly accessible. The published article will be linked to this preprint soon. We have significantly revised the contents of the preprint based on feedback from the peer-review process. Please use and refer to the published journal article for the latest information.

    1. On 2022-07-27 14:46:46, user Karen Lange wrote:

      Overall this is a very thorough study looking at the roles of Septin9 and ARHGEF18 in ciliogenesis. I especially like Figure 3 where the authors compare the severity of partial knock down of SEPTIN9 with siRNA vs in the knock-out CRISPR cell line. The complete lack of cilia in Figure 3J/K is very striking. The experiments using centrin-fused RhoA and ARHGEF18 are very creative. It is impressive how long the cilia are in Figure 5D! I find it interesting that expressing the Centrin-GFP-DHPH construct doesn’t cause the same long cilia phenotype in the Septin9 KO cells. This observation is based on the images shown in the panels because I do not see cilia length measured in Septin9KO + Centrin-GFP-DHPH.

      I appreciate the use of scatter plots to highlight the variability/reproducibility of the data. I assume the different colors relate to different replicates, but this is not clearly stated.

      I have a few specific comments with regards to Figure 7:

      I found it difficult to see the 3 RPGRIP1L puncta. I think if the panels were more zoomed in or larger it would help to better highlight the shift from 3 to 2 puncta in the Septin9 KO cells.

      In the Septin9 KO cells RPGRIP1L and TCTN2 staining was not observed at the transition zone. This observation is not surprising since the Septin9 KO cells do not have cilia (Figure 3J/K). As such, I do not believe that the conclusion that Septin9 “mediates the localization of transition zone components to the ciliary base” is founded. Septin9 could have a function early in ciliogenesis that is not necessarily specific to mediating the localization of transition zone components. Perhaps this could be better resolved in the Septin9 siRNA knock down where short cilia are present.

      The data showing that expression of constitutively active RhoA restores RPGRIP1L and TCTN2 at the transition zone (7I,7J,7M,7N) is very nice and consistent with this construct restoring cilia in the Septin9 KO. However, I think the data in 7M and 7N would be clearer if you included the Sept9 KO data on this graph.

      One last point – Figures 7A, 7B, and the inset on 7C state RPGRIP1 while the text only refers to RPGRIP1L. The Materials and Methods do not mention which antibody was used so I am not clear which protein was the focus of this study. Similarily, I think it is a typo in 7F and the Figure 7 legend where it says TCTN1.

    1. On 2025-07-06 21:14:56, user Pei Wang wrote:

      A major limitation of this study lies in its reliance on the Ptf1a-Cre driver to activate KRAS^G12D. Ptf1a-Cre is active during early embryonic development, leading to KRAS activation well before postnatal pancreatic maturation. This temporal pattern does not accurately model the initiation of PDAC in humans, where oncogenic mutations are thought to accumulate in fully differentiated adult cells over time. As such, the developmental context in which tumorigenesis is initiated in this model may substantially alter the cellular response to oncogenic stress, differentiation potential, and the microenvironmental interactions that shape early neoplastic evolution. Consequently, the conclusions drawn from this model must be interpreted with caution when extrapolating to the human PDAC initiation trajectory.

    1. On 2017-05-11 09:27:23, user Jean Manco wrote:

      Congratulations on resolving a long debate in British archaeology. :)

      The Supplementary Information contributed by archaeologists is excellent. Proof-reading trivia in the latter. Under Camino de las Yeseras: <br /> Line 142: sample id I4245/RISE659 turns into I4245/RISE695 on line 153. I take it that the latter is correct. It is in the supp. table. The child in this burial was dated 1960–1740 calBCE and the adult buried over the child was logically presumed buried at the same time, yet the date of the sample is given as 2280–1790 BCE, which is presumably just a general date for the site.

      Line 154: sample id I2247/RISE698 turns into I4247/RISE698 on line 163. I take it that the latter is correct. It is in the supp. table.

    1. On 2021-06-09 20:58:11, user Jenny Zhang wrote:

      Hi Dr. Tian, my name is Jenny Zhang and I am an undergraduate student studying biomedical research at UCLA. My classmates and I greatly appreciated reading your paper “Enhancing Mask Activity in Dopaminergic Neurons Extends Lifespan in Flies”. Your writing was very clear and the diagrams you provided in Figure 1A and 7A were very helpful in visualizing the experiments. For figure 1A, we were slightly confused by the different colors used for the dots. Providing a key for that aspect of the figure might be helpful in informing readers. Inspired by your diagrams, we think it would be useful to insert a diagram at the start of each set of survivorship curves to show how the experimental question differs in each set. The labelling in Figure 2 was very clear, particularly in the line drawn at 50% and the notation of p-values; we think it would be useful to standardize this format for the following figures to improve cohesiveness. In addition, standardizing the PAM/0273 notation may be useful as well. It may also be beneficial to use bar graphs (with number of days to reach 50% survival on the y-axis) for the survivorship data in figures 3 and 7. This could be an easy way to get the main findings across to readers. Lastly, we had the following lingering questions. What are the flies dying from that is avoided by Mask overexpression? What are the downstream effects of GPCR signalling in DANS? How is mask interacting molecularly with microtubules? A CoIP and western blot may be useful in determining the proteins that Mask interacts with.

    1. On 2025-04-05 10:14:49, user Alexis Gautreau wrote:

      Dear Dr. Krause,

      I would like to draw your attention to an oversight. You forgot to cite a paper from my group, which also reports that NHSL3 regulates cell migration and that NHSL3 interacts with the partners you are also studying: the WAVE complex and Ena/VASP proteins. Our paper by Novikov et al. was published three months ago in Nat Commun:<br /> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-55647-3

      Best regards,

      Alexis Gautreau

    1. On 2025-05-12 20:47:52, user Elzi Volk wrote:

      A large improvement in detail, scope, and sophistication compared to the Petri et al (2021) paper. <br /> A bit disappointing that C. latrans was absent from Fig. 3. <br /> Very glad to see Canini from South America included in analyses. And avoiding couched claims that C. latrans originated in Eurasia. There is no solid evidence…yet. (Perhaps an offshoot study could be revealing.)

    1. On 2025-09-04 12:50:30, user James Glazier wrote:

      An impressive set of experiments measuring molecular dynamics and control inside individual cells at tissue scale coupled to a well validated mathematical model of the critical feedback mechanisms. While the general concept of the somitic clock has been considered for many years, this study breaks new ground in identifying its components and principles of operation and in providing rigorous development and application of a mathematical framework for its study.

    1. On 2019-10-22 02:11:19, user Connor Rosen wrote:

      This is an exciting establishment of a potential new model for pulmonary fibrosis in mice, and I thank the authors for their initial work characterizing this new model. However, what are the patient observations that led to this study? The authors say that "During clinical diagnosis and treatment, we accidentally found that the continuous oral administration of TR drugs at levels above the prescribed dose can induce PF in patients within a certain period of time." I ask the authors: What clinical settings did this occur in? What doses and timings caused fibrosis? What were the precise manifestations of fibrosis, and were they reversible with or without treatment? This is important both to underly the biology of PF and this model, but also as a potential risk with trans-resveratrol treatment in humans.

    1. On 2015-06-16 19:24:08, user Arlin Stoltzfus wrote:

      This has some useful and appropriate analysis tools. It is hard to get a feel for the distribution of expression patterns. As a reader I am flying blind on that issue. I think there would be a great benefit to developing more generalized metrics and graphics for representing expression divergence, instead of applying a binary categorical distinction ("potentially sub-/neofunctionalized" vs. not). I'd like to see a 2d space defined by a total distance metric and an asymmetry metric, accompanied by some expression graphs like Fig 2 showing examples from different areas of the space. CBR1+CBR3 would be an example of high distance, high asymmetry. SLC4A2+SLC4A3 would be an example of high distance, low asymmetry. What if you plot out abs(mean(gene1_i - gene2_i)) vs. mean(abs(gene1_i - gene2_i)) where the index i is to iterate over tissues?

      I want to stress again that "dosage-sharing of expression" is not an alternative to sub-functionalization: it *is* sub-functionalization, or more precisely, quantitative sub-functionalization. Both my original 1999 paper, and Force, et al 1999 proposed the DDC model in both a "quantitative" and "qualitative" form. Qian, et al re-proposed the quantitative DDC model in 2010 without citing me, although I explained the model to George Zhang way back in 2000 when he visited my lab.

      Ferris & Whitt, 1979 [1] is an example of old isozyme data that shows the same kind of asymmetric pattern you are seeing.

      Though I am sympathetic to this kind of model, I have trouble believing that it could result in the kind of 97 % : 3 % division of activity suggested in Fig. 2B. There has to be something else going on to preserve the minor copy in the long-term. This doesn't mean that the quantitative sub-functionalization model is unimportant-- as I pointed out in 1999, this mechanism enormously extends the expected lifespan of duplicates, allowing opportunities for other things to happen-- it just suggests it can't be the whole story.

      [1] Ferris SD and Whitt GS. 1979. Evolution of the Differential Regulation of Duplicate Genes After Polyploidization. J Mol Evol 12: 267-317

    1. On 2024-04-18 00:42:18, user CommunityScientist wrote:

      Work would benefit greatly from a mutation of other zinc fingers and data to suggest there is no DNA binding occurring. Furthermore, I am alarmed by figure 3 as this is not the correct way to report replicates in SMT experiments, arising doubt surrounding the analysis and significance. Figure 4E needs explanation as to why the values overlap yet are shown to be statistically significant. I do not believe the correct statistical tests were used.

    1. On 2017-02-27 09:54:55, user Mia Bengtsson wrote:

      Thanks for sharing this very interesting and informative piece of work! I very much enjoyed the read and several questions and concerns that I had about preprints (from an author perspective) were answered. I have some comments that I hope can be useful:

      lines 31-69, on the "Landscape of preprint servers": Could there be more examples worth mentioning here than PeerJ preprints and BioRxiv? The journal Biogeosciences for example uses a model where submitted papers are published in "Biogeosciences Discussions" while they are in review with Biogeosciences, is this not also a form of preprint?

      lines 58-59: "It is only possible to transfer a PeerJ Preprint for submission to PeerJ." This could be interpreted as if you can only publish in PeerJ after submitting a preprint to PeerJ Preprint, which is not what is meant I think.

      lines 213-216: it was a bit unclear to me initially what this example served to illustrate, perhaps due to the following sentence. Were some of the image manipulated works retracted due to the preprint, before the final publication?

      lines 236-237: relative novelty?

      line 254: That preprints can be revised was news to me, this seems like it could be a major difference to peer-reviewed work where you are usually not even allowed to correct typos once the accepted article has gone online. Perhaps expand on the implications of this?

      line 292-314: This touches on one of my major open questions about preprints currently. The examples online two different strategies on how to coordinate preprint submission with traditional journal submission: Either you submit preprint first, wait for comments that can be integrated into new version which is then submitted to journal (slow). Alternatively you submit preprint and journal version at the same time and use both preprint comments and reviewer comments to improve the MS for a future submission. I would tend to do the latter due to time constraints, but I am concerned that incorporating preprint comments parallell to reviewer comments could confuse (or worse: offend) journal reviewers and editors that are not familiar with the preprint model. Imagine you want to make changes to MS not called for by reviewers, will the editor feel compelled to send out the MS for another round of review thus slowing down the publication process? I guess this should not be an issue if changes are justified well in cover letter (perhaps linking to preprint comments?) and as long as editor is sensible and competent. Nevertheless the issue has crossed my mind when considering submitting preprints parallell to journal submissions.

      line 329: "mSpehereDirect." what is up with the "." here?

      Figure 1a: For a second I was confused by the grey bars until I realised they were indicating the border between years. Will perhaps be more visually clear when year 2017 is included? (very minor issue).

      I'm looking forward to see future versions of this manuscript, preprint or published in journal!

    1. On 2020-11-19 11:29:30, user Martin R. Smith wrote:

      This is a very interesting study. I'm not sure how representative the trees in Fig. 4 are of the dataset more broadly, but the rather pectinate nature of Tree 1 makes me worried that the high Robinson-Foulds distance might be unduly amplified; it's clearly not a 'good' tree by any measure, but in a pectinate setting, misplacement of a single leaf or pair of leaves can make an outsized contribution to the RF distance. Is there a chance that the shapes of the curves in Fig. 4a/b would change if a more sensitive measure of tree distance was employed – perhaps a generalized RF distance or a quartet-based measure? I have found that these approaches give more representative measures of distance between trees than the RF (Smith 2020, Bioinformatics, https://doi.org/10.1093/bio... ).

    1. On 2017-01-21 13:59:05, user Keith Robison wrote:

      Figure 4b: please make ines much heavier & cinder avoiding color for distinguishing stages - different shapes would work better (e.g. rectangle, hexagon, oval) for individuals with color perception issues.

      If you are going to claim portability, then a complete list of equipment is needed, with weights. What are power requirements? Refrigeration requirements?

      What is the yield from each run? What fraction of reads in each were unclassifiable? What is expected sensitivity in a more complex sample?

      Discussion and legend for 4b should emphasize that you started with purified DNA, not bacteria. So time to lyse&purify DBA would need to be added to running time, and differential lysis/extraction could shift your sensitivity.

    1. On 2017-07-14 13:35:54, user Rodolfo Jaffé wrote:

      An alternative approach - Maximum-likelihood Population Effects (MLPE)

      Maximum-likelihood population effects (MLPE) treats the residual for each pairwise distance as the sum of two random population-level effects and an observation-level error (Clarke et al. 2002). Because the MLPE correlation structure allows modelling the non-independence of pairwise distances within a likelihood framework, compatible with model selection, it is particularly appealing for landscape genetic studies (Jaffé et al. 2016). Code implementing the MLPE correlation structure within the R package NLME is provided at:<br /> https://github.com/nspope/c...

      Clarke RT, Rothery P, Raybould AF (2002) Confidence limits for regression relationships between distance matrices: estimating gene flow with distance. Journal of agricultural, biological, and environmental statistics, 7, 361–372.<br /> Jaffé R, Pope N, Acosta AL et al. (2016) Beekeeping practices and geographic distance, not land use, drive gene flow across tropical bees. Molecular Ecology, 25, 5345–5358.

    1. On 2020-05-26 16:16:32, user Ephrem W. wrote:

      Thank you for the well articulated and important work we have been provided with, in this article; I found it as a guide for what my next step and work shall be in regard to RVF. <br /> However, I want to direct the attention of the authors to the fact that RVF virus was reported in 1995, following positive serological tests with no clinical disease, suggesting that the virus has been circulating in the country (Bouna, 2015; Teshome, Kasye, Abiye, and Eshetu, 2016). <br /> Saying so, I would like to direct you to a previous attempt made to predict the outbreak of RVF in Ethiopia, in-fact after recognizing the potential and risk of RVF exposure in livestock in the country, and responding to the needs identified in the National RVF Contingency Plan for Ethiopia. @ <br /> DOI:10.5539/jsd.v11n5p102