6,403 Matching Annotations
  1. Last 7 days
    1. On 2022-11-09 09:15:00, user Hauser Kronenberg DZNE wrote:

      This work is an important resource and characterisation of culture media conditions for anyone doing in vitro iPSC-microglial monocultures.

      1. We were curious if the authors had performed immunocytochemistry for some of the most common microglial markers (eg. Pu.1, IBA1, Tmem119, or similar) with the different media conditions?

      2. Did the authors also ever test the effect of the frequently used poly-D-Lysine or poly-L-ornithin coatings for example? Or play/adjust the density of plated cells?

      3. Unfortunately it wasn’t quite clear to us, if one or all iPSCs lines were used in each round of differentiation and which line is represented in the brightfield images.

    1. On 2021-03-19 17:44:20, user fischmidtlab wrote:

      Great study and important contribution! Quick remark: Our animals are not 'invariably culled' after a successful immunization campaign. After some resting time, they can be immunized again (also no need to cull them when they retire).

    1. On 2015-09-09 15:24:05, user Jean Manco wrote:

      You cite Nielsen, R. et al (2015), Population genomics of Bronze Age Eurasia, Nature 522:167?172.

      This should be Allentoft, M. et al. (2015), Population genomics of Bronze Age Eurasia Nature 522:167-172. See http://www.nature.com/natur...

      You cite Pääbo, S. et al (2014), Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans, Nature, 513, pp 409-413

      This should be Lazaridis, I et al (2014), Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans, Nature, 513, pp 409-413

      http://www.nature.com/natur...

      Neither found R1a1a in Yamnaya cemeteries. Is there another paper to come Pääbo et al 2015?

    1. On 2021-07-31 05:50:33, user Stephen Fairweather wrote:

      The discovery of the essential L-lysine plasma membrane transporter from the human intracellular parasite T.gondii. Large amount of data from various experiment systems and in vivo and very rigorous demonstration of all conclusions. A paper worked on since 2015.

    1. On 2015-04-20 05:14:10, user Manolis Dermitzakis wrote:

      Regarding replication on Fig 3: the most reliable replication is when a discovery in small sample is replicated in larger sample size. The 373CEU to YRI89 is a discovery in a large sample size (373) and replication in a small sample size (89). It was presented for people's information. Already 53% and 69% are very low replication rates and not reliable stimates of true postives. The best estimate is the of YRI (89 indivs) replicated in CEU (373 indivs). There the estimates are 97% for both methods., which is where (plus more analysis to be presented in the final version of the paper) we base our conclusion overall that methods are similar is confidence of discovery but complementary in terms of what type of asQTLs they discover.

    1. On 2025-02-19 03:28:56, user Yue Jia-Xing wrote:

      Author comment:<br /> This work has been formally published in Genome Research recently under a different title:<br /> "Interactive visualization and interpretation of pangenome graphs by linear reference–based coordinate projection and annotation integration".<br /> Advanced online on 2025.01.13, formal publication in 2025.02.<br /> DOI: 10.1101/gr.279461.124 <br /> Link: https://genome.cshlp.org/content/35/2/296.full

    1. On 2016-05-27 16:23:03, user Karl Muller wrote:

      One day, Louis Slesin's article in Microwave News announcing these findings will be seen in exactly the same light as that guy in the Titanic movie, shouting: "Iceberg! Iceberg! Straight ahead!"

      This ship cannot be turned around. Motorola, in its SEC filings on business risks for 2011:<br /> https://www.facebook.com/EM...<br /> ... said that "adverse factual developments" regarding mobile phones on health could severely impact its business. It has since dropped that warning from its filings, even as the iceberg approached. This is going to devastate shares, and devastate shareholders like the pension funds, and they are going to ask: *what* did the industry know, and *when* did they know it?

      This is where the case of Murray vs Motorola also becomes critical:<br /> http://www.saferemr.com/201...<br /> ... a class action suit that has been in the courts for nearly 20 years is about to go into discovery, where we really do here in a court, for the first time -- what *did* the industry know? And when did they know it?

      Now, this whole case will be carried out in the light of this finding: *mobile phone radiation causes cancer*. Oddly enough, it causes the exact cancers we see being caused.

      This is the end of the wireless industry as we know it. Iceberg! Iceberg! Straight ahead!

    1. On 2021-06-26 15:16:11, user Raymond .Enke wrote:

      I love the idea for a National Center for Science Engagement. Groundwork laid by the SEA-CUREs, DNA Barcoding, GEP, etc have proven that various CUREs can be implemented with a reasonable per student cost. Organization at the national level would only further decrease cost of implementation as the efficiency of implementing these CUREs increases. How do I get involved?

    1. On 2019-11-04 07:49:30, user Nikhil Ratna wrote:

      Extremely important research. I have a question.<br /> In the methods it is given as, "We removed 133 individuals with a<br /> comorbid diagnosis of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, schizotypy or schizoaffective disorder (since these are likely to share risk genes for psychiatric disorders independently of their HD status)"<br /> What is the basis of classifying people as psychiatric patients of HD independent of HD status? Since psychiatric symptoms in HD are of broadest range and can present in any stage of the disease, how is it possible to say that the psychiatric symptoms in an individual are related to or not specifically to CAG status.

    1. On 2017-04-23 02:49:30, user Keith Robison wrote:

      Discovered a small hitch in one thing I suggested -- the Baikal seal in the Beklemisheva analysis has 2n=32 but Hawaiian monk seals have 2n=34 (Lu et al 2000). According to Arnason 1974 the 2n=34 karyotype is probably ancestral with a single fusion generating the 2n=32 karyotype. Fronicke et al 1997 would make the fused chromosome "S", which is homologous to human chromosomes 17 and 5. Some more musings over on the blog

    1. On 2017-08-08 11:32:05, user Inigo Martincorena wrote:

      Hi David. Thanks for your comments! I absolutely agree. We are measuring selection at the level of cohorts of samples not at the level of a phylogeny within a single tumour. They are very different things indeed. An analogy with standard phylogenetics would be measuring selection within a population (as you suggest) or running dN/dS across species, using one reference genome per species. Cohort analysis of somatic mutations across cancer samples is conceptually more similar to the latter. This is also where dN/dS is most frequently used in phylogenetics.

      Regarding your specific questions, we are very much aware of the importance of using appropriate substitution models. In fact, this is one of the key factors required to obtain unbiased dN/dS estimates, as we show in the Suppl Material. In the revised version of the paper, which is not available in BioRxiv, we have added a number of analyses that you will find of interest, including AIC and simulations of cohorts of samples with heterogeneous mixtures of mutation rates, signatures and selection. To answer your specific question, AIC shows that the 192-parameter model is vastly superior to a model of 12 parameters without context-dependence in all datasets analysed in our study (e.g. AIC values in the breast dataset are 3,689 and 39,750 respectively). But more details will be available in the revised manuscript. I have also included the ability to do AIC model selection in the package that I will release very soon.

      Finally, you ask about mixture of negative and positive selection across samples (the same could also be said about sites). We already discuss this in the manuscript. This is of course possible in any dN/dS study. However, this appears highly unlikely to be a relevant factor here. When removing known cancer genes, we find dN/dS~1 across any group of genes studied in any group of samples analysed (see Fig. 3). Also, the distributions of dN/dS values at gene level (Fig. 3A-B) confirm that the vast majority of genes display a dN/dS=1. For this to be the result of mixtures of positive and negative selection across samples or across sites, we would require a perfect balance of the extent of positive and negative selection in each gene, including in non-expressed genes or likely-passenger genes (unlikely to have significant positive selection). This is unlikely to be a significant factor.

      Thanks for the interesting comments!

    1. On 2017-01-18 03:41:12, user Keith Robison wrote:

      The notorious P.flourescens has slipped twice into your manuscript. Please reconsider citing Mikheyev & Tin - it's an awful paper & not a remotely representative portrayal of the furrent state of the platform (put another way, you've clearly ignored their conclusion and gone ahead and used MinION, so why pick that paper?)

    1. On 2025-07-29 17:20:59, user Kristin G wrote:

      ???? AI ? Bio: Testing the Physics Beneath the Predictions<br /> Beyond RMSD: What AlphaFold3 Really Understands

      Dan Herschlag was my postdoc advisor. Dan taught me how to think mechanistically, how to test assumptions, and how to pursue scientific clarity with unflinching rigor.

      That legacy is all over this paper. And is incredibly needed in this era of AI hype where data volume often sidelines careful model-driven science.

      Herschlag et al. show that while AlphaFold3 predicts protein structures with backbone-level structural precision, it struggles to capture the physical rules that govern biological function.

      But this paper isn’t a takedown: it’s a roadmap for how to go further.

      What They Did<br /> Rather than rely on RMSD alone, the team evaluated AlphaFold2 and AlphaFold3 against:<br /> ->Energetic rules: bond torsions, hydrogen bonds, and van der Waals contacts<br /> ->Experimental ensembles: from multi-temperature crystallography<br /> ->Model confidence: comparing pLDDT to physical plausibility

      What They Found:

      ~30% of side-chain interactions deviated from experimental observations, often with incorrect partners or implausible geometries<br /> High-confidence predictions (>90 pLDDT) still showed strained or physically invalid conformations<br /> Energetically-favorable conformations could increase RMSD and be penalized by the model<br /> AlphaFold3 missed ~85% of conformational variability seen in real experimental ensembles

      Key Insight: Physics != Proximity<br /> AlphaFold can recapitulate Ramachandran and Lennard-Jones-like patterns. But that doesn’t mean it understands physical constraints.<br /> To improve these tools, we need evaluation metrics grounded in molecular energetics, not just geometry.

      ???? Takeaway for Scientists<br /> This paper is a reminder that progress requires more than prettier predictions. It demands models that reflect the physics that drive biology.

    1. On 2025-09-23 20:28:30, user Gennady Gorin wrote:

      I read through this with some interest. If you are not yet aware of it, you may be interested in our paper from several years ago: https://www.cell.com/cell-systems/fulltext/S2405-4712(23)00244-2 . Basically, although the moment-based estimates are useful (and almost mandatory for inference over non-iid samples), it is also relatively straightforward to compute the full likelihoods by quadrature. As the cells within a cell type are assumed iid here, this is more or less compatible with the framework.

      The low-beta regime can also be represented as a two-state model with bursty (and potentially leaky) expression in the active state, slightly more straightforward to solve numerically.

      For the connection to ATAC, please see https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.110.064405 . The same model is straightforward to generalize to some latent regulator or a coupled series thereof (although the best way to define such coupling is still obscure).

      The joint modeling of these quantities is a somewhat underexplored problem. One key issue we raise in the PRE paper is that noise modeling for ATAC is unusually challenging. There are, of course, other challenges, like the slightly non-iid nature of measurements across supposedly homogeneous cells ("cell size" effects) and the usual DNA/gene mapping issues: how should one map a peak to a particular gene? How should one represent the relationship between multiple peaks that all ostensibly control or overlap a single gene?

      It is exciting to see people pursuing mechanistic approaches for this problem, and I look forward to future work.

    1. On 2021-05-25 15:41:08, user Ian Hastings wrote:

      I have two major comments on this preprint.

      Firstly, the conclusions are not novel but echo those we previously reported several years ago from similar pharmacological considerations [1] i.e. that selection against ACTs will likely occur in two phases i.e. “Phase 1 is characterised by resistance eroding the therapeutic capacity of the partner drug…….. Phase 2 then starts because both the artemisinin and partner drugs have similar therapeutic capacities so both contribute to cure and hence selection pressure exists for resistance to each drug”. The current preprint essentially repeats this and demonstrates that the more phase 1 has progressed, the faster phase 2 proceed, see their abstract i.e “Higher frequencies of pre-existing partner-drug resistant genotypes lead to earlier establishment of artemisinin resistance”. This is the same conclusion we reached previously i.e. we stated “The main threat to antimalarial drug effectiveness and control comes from resistance evolving to the partner drugs”. I made the corresponding author aware of our previous work [1] and it is disappointing that they choose not to make this previous work available to readers, nor to interpret there results within this context. In fact, the very title of the preprint states it is rediscovering our Phase 2. Two publication reaching the same conclusion are obviously more compelling than one, hence the need to cross-cite

      Secondly, they have modelled three partner drugs: amodiaquine (AQ), piperaquine (PPQ) and lumefantrine (LF). It is important to note their modelling differs from the real drugs’ pharmacology in some key respects. Their parametrisation assumes one-compartment (1-c) pharmacokinetics for all drugs and calibration between drugs differs solely in their half-lives and maximum killing rates; EC50 values are selected to obtain their chosen failure rates and resistance mutations affect IC50. In reality, PPQ and LF follow 2- or 3- compartment pharmacokinetics (depending on the source publication) while AQ is even more complex (it is converted to its active metabolite DEAQ and both AQ and DEAQ have antimalarial activity and 2 compartment pharmacokinetics). The calibrations are in arbitrary units (e.g. dosage per patient in mg/Kg are not given); compare this to, for example, the extensive pharmacological calibrations tabulated in [2]. The pharmacological details are not obvious in the preprint. They cite their ref #17, but this back-cites to the SI of a previous paper [3]. Essentially ,they use 3 different calibration of a 1-compartment drug. There is nothing inherently wrong in using a PK approximation using simple 1-c dynamics provided this is clearly stated. However, calling them PPQ, LF and AQ without making this clear gives an aura of pharmacological accuracy and precision which is simply not present in their models. This is a vital caveat given recent realisation that the evolution of drug resistance needs to be placed firmly within its pharmacological context (e.g. discussed in these reviews [2, 4]).<br /> There is nothing inherently wrong in this work, it is essentially a question of transparency i.e. (1) to acknowledge previous work and that their results are consistent with previous analyses rather than being novel (2) to provide explicit description and discussion of their pharmacological models of specific antimalaria drugs.

      Ian Hastings, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.

      1. Hastings IM, Hodel EM, Kay K. Quantifying the pharmacology of antimalarial drug combination therapy. Scientific Reports 2016; 6:32762.
      2. Zaloumis S, Humberstone A, Charman S, et al. Assessing the utility of an anti-malarial pharmacokinetic-pharmacodynamic model for aiding drug clinical development. Malaria J 2012; 11:303.
      3. Nguyen TD, Olliaro P, Dondorp AM, et al. Optimum population-level use of artemisinin combination therapies: a modelling study. The Lancet Global Health 2015; 3:e758-e66.
      4. Simpson JA, Zaloumis S, DeLivera AM, Price RN, McCaw JM. Making the Most of Clinical Data: Reviewing the Role of Pharmacokinetic-Pharmacodynamic Models of Anti-malarial Drugs. The AAPS Journal 2014.
    1. On 2025-05-06 21:52:34, user Young Cho wrote:

      Summary

      In my opinion, Nanopore sequencing incorporated with 3 modes in a single instrument is great. I understand that in this work, the authors sequenced large genomes, so it requires PromethION. If working with smaller genome-size sample (e.g. shrimp), does MinION work as well (since MinION is more cost-effective for majority of labs). Also, from the Table 1, it looked like more parameters are better when using trio than Pore-C. Therefore, I was wondering if Pore-C is a good choice over trio in this case?

      Introduction

      • Authors stated that Pacbio HiFi provides 99.5% accuracy and Oxford nanopore (ONT) for ultra long reads gives 95% accuracy. To my knowledge, ONT provides higher accuracy rate than this number. Therefore, it could be better if you could provide references for these information.

      Results

      • Figures and captions: figure resolution was not great

      Discussion

      • Authors mentioned that there is a large variability in yields over times due to pre-released versions of Duplex sequencing. Is there any way to solve this? Because from my point of view, this is an important point.

      Methods

      • Authors did not mention how they used Pore-C data to assemble human genome.
    1. On 2021-02-10 18:35:55, user Arnab Ghosh wrote:

      The references for "worldwide dominant Asp614Gly<br /> variant, introduced a new elastase proteolysis site in the spike protein (2, 21)." needs to be updated as the statement is not mentioned in the referred papers. The following paper talked about elastase cleavage site at Spike:614G it for first time:<br /> https://www.biorxiv.org/con... (May 05, 2020); now published: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.m...

    1. On 2020-09-14 17:16:21, user Arlin Stoltzfus wrote:

      The text says that "the original residue was randomly mutated to one of the 19 other amino acids." But the number of alternative amino acids accessible by mutating one nucleotide of a codon is typically 6 or 7, not 19. The other 12 or 13 require double or triple mutations. Furthermore, any heterogeneity in mutation rates, e.g., transition bias, necessarily increases the chance of parallelism. If effects like this are not taken into account, then the null distribution is mis-specified and greatly under-estimates the extent of parallelism.

    1. On 2023-03-08 21:13:53, user Elizabeth Duncan wrote:

      We read your impressive study as part of a student journal club at the Markey Cancer Center (University of Kentucky). We appreciate how many controls and orthogonal experiments you did to test your hypotheses rigorously.

      One question we have is regarding the genetic background of the cell lines used e.g., A2780, A2058, HCT116, AGS, etc. Given that you made an important point about the mutual exclusivity between the 1q aneuploidy and TP53 mutations in patient cancer samples, we wondered if the cell lines used to manipulate chromosome ploidy were wild-type for TP53. Upon searching the literature and ATTC webpage, it seems like all of the above lines are WT for TP53 except for melanoma line A2058. Notably, this is also the line in which you show significant regain of chromosome 1q after deletion. We see that you tested the role of p53 in aneuploid addiction by mutating TP53 in the TP53-WT line A2780, but what role might the TP53 mutant status of A2058 cells play in their robust re-acquisition of 1q aneuploidy? Have you tried restoring the TP53 gene to its WT sequence in this cell line and comparing their ability to regain chromosome 1q?

    1. On 2017-06-24 07:54:37, user sandeep chakraborty wrote:

      I thank the authors (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.go... "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4644263/)") for engaging in a public debate on the TEP-paper.

      I understand their critical view on my pre-prints - "and once more highlights the critical need for peer-reviewing" and " we wish to point at the importance of peer review".

      However, I would like to point simultaneously that biorxiv provides a platform to ask `impertinent' questions in case the human (and fallible) peer-review process might have been missed out on asking those.<br /> "That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer." - Jacob Bronowski.<br /> So, I hope readers judge the data I am providing - and not my credentials.

      I will try to prove the statement "the author clearly has no understanding of the general principle of surrogate signatures" wrong below<br /> in details.

      My problems are with:<br /> 1) low counts indicating degraded RNA (or low sample amount) - and lack of supporting information about real values.<br /> 2) application of "deep learning" techniques in lieu of the low counts.

      The problems with measuring low counts have been critiqued by Sinha, et al, 2017.<br /> http://biorxiv.org/content/...

      And noted in a news item:<br /> https://www.wired.com/2017/...<br /> "Sinha and other academic researchers aren’t the only ones who need that kind of needle-in-a-haystack sensitivity.<br /> Precision medicine—like spotting a piece of tumor DNA in a drop of blood or finding a rare variant among the 3 billion base pairs in the human genome1—also requires high-resolution sequencing. Clinical researchers and biotech start-ups that need that kind of resolving power are increasingly using Illumina’s ExAmp chemistry and the machines that employ it, including its newest line, the NovaSeq."

      Since the TEP-study is using the same "needle-in-a-haystack sensitivity", it needs to provide the data that shows over-expression of MET.<br /> "Overexpression of MET protein in tumor tissue relative to adjacent normal tissues occurs in 25-75% of NSCLC" - https://www.mycancergenome..... Is it 25%, or is it 75%, in the current 60 sample size - a wide range. So, it is very very important to see that the classification has been done properly, before providing statistics based on surrogate biomarkers.

      RNA-seq values certainly show no over-expression (on the contrary - but leaving that aside, since surrogacy does not require them to be there)<br /> Healthy MET = [287 197 61 142 178 127 7 176 2 133 188 156 23 2 185 170 104 23 28 71 108]<br /> NSCLC MET = [0 14 24 5 11 9 45 1 5 11 9 12 5 2 34 3 7 42 6 16 12 2 5 2]

      Instead, the paper summarily states:<br /> "Assessment of MET overexpression in non-small cell lung cancer FFPE slides was performed by immunohistochemistry (anti-Total cMET SP44 Rabit mono-clonal antibody (mAb), Ventana, or the A2H2-3 anti-human MET mAb (Gruver et al., 2014)).

      The challenges in FFPE include:<br /> 1) Degraded/fragmented DNA or RNA:<br /> 2) Insufficient amount of sample<br /> https://www.promega.com/-/m...

      And similarly, the EGFR mutations were determined using FFPE (what EGFR mutations? there are so many, see below).

      Is this not the same problem being stated by Sinha, et. al, 2017, albeit for a different sequencer?

      In the refutation to my analysis, Dr Best states:<br /> "Surrogate signatures are composed of indirect biomarkers, and as stated in the publication the direct markers were not detected using thromboSeq (shallow sequencing), in contrast to amplicon sequencing (deep sequencing), which did allow for the detection of such direct markers in tumor-educated platelets."<br /> I guess it refers to the line in the manuscript:<br /> "We subsequently compared the diagnostic accuracy of the TEP mRNA classification method with a targeted KRAS (exon 12 and 13) and EGFR (exon 20 and 21) amplicon deep sequencing strategy ($5,0003 coverage) on the Illumina Miseq platform using prospectively collected blood samples of patients with localized or metastasized cancer.".

      Two questions:<br /> (A) Where is the supporting data? With the zero counts of EGFR in the RNA-seq sample, is it not important to see that?<br /> EGFR in NSCLC = [1 4 1 0 14 9 1 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 19 0 0 21 0 0 6 0 0 0]

      (B) EGFR (exon 20 and 21) gives a subset of possible EGFR mutations. Does its absence suffice to infer wildtype?<br /> Here is a comprehensive list from https://www.mycancergenome....<br /> Kinase Domain Duplication<br /> c.2156G>C (G719A)<br /> c.2155G>T (G719C)<br /> c.2155G>A (G719S)<br /> Exon 19 Deletion<br /> Exon 19 Insertion<br /> Exon 20 Insertion<br /> c.2290_2291ins (A763_Y764insFQEA)<br /> c.2303G>T (S768I)<br /> c.2369C>T (T790M)<br /> c.2573T>G (L858R)<br /> c.2582T>A (L861Q)<br /> Just to specify, Exon 20 and 21 spans from "2541 to 2881". And includes only a couple of possible mutations.

      How does all these different mutations modify the surrogate signatures in the same manner?

      About the Kappa statistics - Table S7 talks about "EGFR mut" in "4/39 (10%)".<br /> Since only 36 samples are annotated (Table S1), how does one know about the remaining 3?

      "the author clearly has no understanding of the general principle of surrogate signatures" - here is what I understand. Please correct me if I am wrong.

      Platelets circulating through the body when in proximity to tumor cells get their mRNA profile changed. "A total of 1,453 out of 5,003 mRNAs were increased and 793 out of 5,003 mRNAs were decreased in TEPs as compared to platelet samples of healthy<br /> donors". (See below for questions on the validity of the statistics).<br /> Now, these are passed onto the SVM algorithm.<br /> I have used the perl version http://search.cpan.org/~kwi..., so I know a bit.<br /> Essentially, this is some sort of machine learning (there are features with values, binary or otherwise, and training sets) and then validation (10 fold, for example : (a) Partition dataset into 10 sets of size n/10. (b) Train on 9 datasets and test on 1. (c) Repeat 10 times and take a mean<br /> accuracy). As mentioned in the TEP-paper, "The algorithms we developed use a limited number of different spliced RNAs for sample classification". And finally, comes out a set of genes that classifies between different diseases or between disease and healthy (and this is final problem, see my closing statements). I understand it does not even have to be the genes implicated in the cancer (for example, MET and EGFR in NSCLC).<br /> Thats the "surrogate signature" theory.

      Moving on, take one gene (TRAT1) from the set of 1072 genes which is supposed to discriminate between healthy and pan-cancer (Fig 1F and G column in TableS4).

      Healthy = [158 75 39 88 98 96 0 242 0 92 359 53 7 3 53 51 103 11 1801 48 67]<br /> NSCLC = [0 1 8 0 40 1 855 0 8 10 2 25 1 288 19 0 0 3 1 3 2 0 13 0]

      An empirical glance shows some difference - most NSCLC have<br /> low counts, and most healthy samples have higher counts (though few go the other way, still I will say it shows difference).<br /> But, the raw reads are too low for discrimination, and as in the case of MET if small reads can finally translate into much larger numbers by using FFPE sequencing, then this can go either way.

      Because for MET these are the values as shown above are :<br /> Healthy MET = [287 197 61 142 178 127 7 176 2 133 188 156 23 2 185 170 104 23 28 71 108]<br /> NSCLC MET = [0 14 24 5 11 9 45 1 5 11 9 12 5 2 34 3 7 42 6 16 12 2 5 2]

      If FFPE analysis finds over-expression in NSCLC from such RNA-seq data, what is to say of the real expression levels of other genes which have expression in the same levels (like TRAT1) - they could be anything !!

      2) The P-values of the over-expression values seem doubtful. Take the ribosomal gene RPSA (Table S2) - another gene used for discrimination.

      Healthy (21 samples) = [490 323 160 783 306 342 531 593 241 283 846 364 44 572 253 372 701 54 1416 214 546]

      Pan-cancer<br /> (98 samples) = [118 342 381 328 122 991 151 191 242 347 265 580 195 88 279 354 213 366 92 118 317 292 74 206 157 171 343 117 194 136 209 189 170 160 15 155 300 734 46 173 288 140 119 762 1156 341 223 363 508 416 709 73 40 227 204 174 156 148 147 255 324 298 121 194 295 103 58 1078 206 190 50 140 156 457 577 152 260 175 147 105 179 178 201 275 134 277 19 315 215 71 120 189 102 175 102 444 139 133]

      Visually, I dont see any difference to justify a P-value of 1E-38 (this is ranked the second), and will find it hard to believe any statistic that comes up with that number.<br /> Again, these counts are too low - and as mentioned above with MET, can go either way - when amplified.

      Note, the lowest RPKM of RPSA in set of tissues is 83 (+-9) in liver - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.go....<br /> The values above from the TEP-study are raw reads - dividing them number of million reads per kilobase of transcript,<br /> would give very low values.<br /> "Platelet RNA sequencing yielded a mean read count of $22 million reads per sample". And the gene is 1186 long. So divide by about 22 to get the RPKM above.

      As conclusion, I can describe the basic problem of this flow in this way - assume<br /> 1) One randomly assign values to each gene count,<br /> 2) Remove genes where the random generator has assigned equal values or too random values<br /> 3) Give it to a classifier to do its MAGIC, which will finally give a set of genes which will separate out the classes.<br /> Thats its job, and we have made it easier for it by step 2.<br /> Each time one does these steps, she/he will get a different answer - with no biological significance.

      Here, RNA-seq is not a random number generator (platelet markers have huge counts) - but for low values genes, its counts cannot be trusted, and becomes almost random.

      best regards,<br /> Sandeep

    1. On 2024-10-30 14:15:51, user Anonymous wrote:

      Dear authors,

      as part of a group activity in our lab we discussed your very interesting paper with the goal to review it. The below review is the result of this exercise and therefor reflects the thoughts and concerns of several people. We hope this helps you with your way forward to publish the paper in a good journal.

      Review:

      The manuscript by De Tito et al. reports a hitherto unknown role for ATG9 in recruitment of PI4K2A to damaged lysosomes to control the levels of PI(4)P, lysosomal membrane contact site formation with the ER, and lipid transfer from ER to damaged lysosomes. They report that this mechanism is controlled by ARFIP2, which shuttles between the Golgi where it anchors ATG9 and lysosomes, and by the AP-3 complex, which mediates retrieval of ATG9 from lysosomes. Finally, the authors show a role for their proposed mechanism in lysosome damage induced by Salmonella infection. The manuscript deals with the timely topic of lysosomal damage repair and PI4K2A was recently emerging as a key player in this process. Mechanisms for PI4K2A recruitment to the sites of damaged lysosomes were so far elusive. Although the manuscript is certainly of interest for the field, the presented evidence on which the claims and the proposed model are based on seem not always substantial enough and further work is required.

      Major concerns<br /> • Novelty and generalization: Although the findings suggest new functions for ATG9A and ARFIP2, they overlap significantly with previous work on autophagic and lysosomal repair pathways. The novelty of these findings, in comparison to earlier research, could be emphasized more clearly.<br /> • The claim that ARFIP2 "modulates lipid transfer for lysosomal repair" could benefit from additional direct evidence linking lipid transfer to lysosomal recovery and ARFIP2's specific role in this process. There is only one in vitro experiment directly showing lipid transfer modulation by ARFIP2 (Fig. 5K). The authors should use the ARFIP2 W99A mutant in this experiment to test whether lipid transfer modulation is specific and according to their model.<br /> • A central claim of the manuscript is a role for ARFIP2 in the repair of damaged lysosomes. The gold standard assay in the field is recovery of lysotracker fluorescence after LLOME-induced damage as shown in Fig. 2G. The way the experiment is presented does not instill confidence. The effects are relatively modest, it is unclear how the statistics were done, the representative images in the supplement only remotely resemble lysotracker stainings, how a reliable lysosome number from these images could be extracted is unclear, it is not shown whether and how much the cells express GFP-ARFIP2, the time points of the images do not match the relevant time points in the quantification, and the lysosome number in the different samples before LLOME treatment is not factored in. <br /> • The major lysosome repair assay in the manuscript is Galectin staining. This is a rather indirect assay as compared to the lysotracker recovery assay as it shows the damage rather than the repair. Could there be repaired lysosomes that still are positive for Galectin? Is the total Galectin expression level the same in the cell lines and conditions used? Furthermore, spot quantification for lysosomal damage markers like LGALS3 (Figure 2f) does not account for cell size or density, potentially leading to misinterpretation of the data. The authors further need to show lysotracker recovery in ATG9 loss of function to substantiate their claims.<br /> • The authors show that ARFIP2 and ATG9 affect PI4K2A localization in cells. The “delivery” of PI4K2A to lysosomes, however, which is a central claim in this manuscript, is insufficiently demonstrated. Same is true for the “retrieval” of ATG9: The authors claim that AP-3 and ARFIP2 are important for the retrieval of ATG9A vesicles. Even though they show effects of these proteins on ATG9A presence at the lysosomes, they never manage to show that retrieval really is impaired. I am not fully sure if it is possible to make videos that convincingly show this. Either they should try that, or they should not hammer so hard on the word retrieval when they never show it specifically. <br /> • The dynamic interactions of the relevant components need to be better demonstrated and characterized. E.g. interactions ATG9-PI4K2A interaction needs to be proven and characterized better (e.g. by co-IP, immunogold or similar techniques). Otherwise the role of ATG9 is much secondary, and should be a ARFIP2-mainly focused paper. The experiments in figure 4H and 4G seem ideally suited for this purpose but the authors fail to show the relevant components in the same blot.<br /> • The increased formation of membrane contact sites is insufficiently demonstrated. The authors need to use electron microscopy, super resolution microscopy, SPLICS or other appropriate techniques to make this claim<br /> • The way of quantifying protein localization to lysosomes (intensity lysosomes/total) seems heavily dependent on the lysosome coverage of the cells. In conditions where to my impression the overall number of lysosomes also changes, I would like to see a negative control that demonstrates that the enhanced lysosome localization is not just by chance, since there are more lysosomes. This applies for instance to Figure 4E+F and 5A+B.<br /> • I am not satisfied with the data analysis they presented. The authors should indicate the statistical test for each piece of data they analysed including an explanation, why did they chose particular test. For instance, in fig. 2g they compare the amount of puncta or lysosomes (it is not clear as well) in the cell in a pairwise manner. It would be more appropriate to implement a statistical test that can compare the curves fitted with the data points or a test which can compare each time point individually, i.e. Kaplan-Meier plot.

      Minor comments<br /> • The zooms generally miss scalebars<br /> • Which part of the picture the zoom is from is often not indicated<br /> • Many of the images are hard to interpret because of low contrast, I would recommend to put their individual channels in grey<br /> • Fig3f. requires a better representative image and although there is a line indicated there is no line plot<br /> • Fig. 1c: show quantification for pS6K<br /> • Fig. 2b: data points are the same as figure 1b<br /> • Fig. 3: Live-imaging of ATG9A with AP-3D1 is needed

    1. On 2021-12-06 15:49:22, user Simon wrote:

      Many experts in the fields are skeptical of the validity and accuracy of the methods used in this work and therefore of the conclusions drawn in the article.

      Criticisms:

      The structure of the Omicron RBD made using mutations in Pymol cannot be trusted without proper structural data on the omicron RBD, because Omicron contains a high amount of mutations, the mutations cluster in a very disordered region of the RBD and influence of the glycans is disregarded (See e.g for their importance https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10... "https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acscentsci.0c01056)").

      The methods used to predict stability generally tend to work better on decreased stability than for gain of function. There is no benchmark against existing biophysical assays (e.g from deep mutational scanning) to show that the used method (i-mutant3.0) works on the RBD. In addition, the effect of multiple mutations are likely not additive but subject to epistasis. The used predictor is quite old and should be compared with newer approaches.

      In general, protein docking is unreliable to estimate binding affinity in absolute terms. Especially in this case because the structures used were obtained by simple mutagenesis in PyMol without any equilibration/relaxation. The conclusions are not be trusted without additional experimental or more reliable computational analysis that includes the proper glycan shield of the protein and relaxed structures.

      It is unclear how a table of amino acid composition and corresponding secondary structure prediction is useful or has any meaning for the conclusions of the article. The fact that the RBD is mainly alpha helical is not an indicator for high structural stability. The differences between the predicted fractions of alpha helices are meaningless and very small.

      Some experts expressing their criticisms:

      https://twitter.com/ElisaTe...<br /> https://twitter.com/RolandD...<br /> https://twitter.com/jpglmro...

    1. On 2024-10-08 19:41:38, user Reena Sharma wrote:

      The key message of the study is that heavy metals like cadmium (Cd) and mercury (Hg) pose significant threats to plant health, but legumes, including Medicago truncatula, exhibit genetic variation in their ability to tolerate and accumulate these toxic metals. By conducting a transcriptomic analysis of plants with varying levels of tolerance to Cd and Hg, the study identified tissue-specific, genotype-specific, and metal-specific gene expression patterns.

      Notably, plants inoculated with mercury-tolerant rhizobia strains carrying a mercury reductase (Mer) operon experienced less reduction in nodule number, plant biomass, and iron distribution under Hg stress. This suggests that Hg-tolerant rhizobia can mitigate Hg toxicity in plants, enhancing resilience in contaminated environments. These findings highlight the potential to optimize legume-rhizobia interactions for improving plant tolerance to heavy metals and reducing heavy metal transport to edible parts of the plant, which is critical for food safety.

    1. On 2020-04-04 03:29:03, user eugnene ioanid wrote:

      Prof. Darian-Smith's lab has produced most interesting research seeking out the role of sprouting in recovery of digital grasping of a pellet. Our own work indicated that precision grip, as reported and explained by Vierk was lost after dorsal column section. We found that the problems in such a task is quite different for a rhyzotomized monkey (C2-T12), bilat or unilat [b/deaff or u/deaff), as opposed to a monkey with dorsal column or dorsal column nuclei lesion. The latter's deficit is totally in manipulative skills and after 3 yrs of trying daily never returns, replaced by a crude power grip or raking whole hand movement. By contrast the d or u deaffs eventually acquire exquisite digital coordination when only a precision grip provides reward. Their reach, however, in contrast to dorsal column or nuclei lesion (as reported by Vierck) is severely dysmetric as so well demonstrated by Gilman. However, dorsal rhizotomy superimposed on dorsal columns section produces severe dymetria but coordinated digital precision grip recovers faster than in deaff alone. We hypothesized that loss of dorsal columns causes severe noise in the somatosensory system from which deaff monkeys are liberated by the total removal of sensory input. It also seemed to us that somatosensory input is far more crucial for the axial and torso large muscles for posture and arm stabilization over the target. Crowley et al add a most important component, CorticoSpinal sprouting, by indicating that sprouting is not critical to manual sensorimotor coordination, suggesting that the descending signal does more to release spinal synergies and primitives as so elegantly indicated by BIzzi and colleagues.

    1. On 2018-01-16 01:44:35, user QW wrote:

      This manuscript is highly flawed. Data in Sup fig 3 contradicts the conclusions of the paper. The RNA is present every where. <br /> No quantifications make it hard to trust that the images were not cheery picked.

    1. On 2022-05-09 20:31:44, user Harmen Draisma wrote:

      Many thanks for sharing this -- on page 2 you write that "GWAS signals ... are enriched in gene regulatory elements and eQTLs", and I'm wondering why then in the rest of the paper you make such an ostensibly stark delineation between "GWAS hits" and "eQTLs", i.e. if these eQTLs and GWAS hits can colocalize "i.e., indicate the same [causal] genetic variant" as per page 2 also? Thanks

    1. On 2019-03-29 14:31:31, user S. Biffo wrote:

      Nice work, from what I understood upon a fast reading. I have a couple of observations, one more phylosophical than a critic, the other is a question. Point one, in order to really know that modified RACK1 leads to a functional ribosome one should really do a knock-in mouse. We did not expect that in mice RACK1 loss, due to an hypomorphic allele was lethal, to the point that we could not rescue it in the p53 -/- background and we could not even arrive to the MEFs! In other terms, since people describe "ribosomal heterogeneity" in animal organs, I think that in vitro studies can be misleading when dealing with a property of ribosomes that we may suspect "perhaps" relevant in vivo. The other is a question, man proteomic studies identify Tyr phosphorylation of RACK at Y52. In your study, is p-Y52 likely to play a role in the off-rate? Bye, bye and thanks for posting it (Biffo)

    1. On 2017-04-12 00:13:38, user Kyle Elliott Mathewson wrote:

      Interesting finding, but needs more validation in my opinion. A concern for me would be the variation in the recording location across the groups. Where were the participants seated? what was going on around them? We find large decreases in the peak of alpha when people move from inside to outside the lab

    1. On 2020-01-24 13:44:23, user Yen Shu Chen wrote:

      The authors did not share (no GenBank/GISAID accession number are <br /> provided) the genome sequence of the critical bat-CoV that represents a <br /> close relative to human 2019-nCoV. <br /> No way to access/reproduce/further use their result. Do scientific journals accept such practice?

    1. On 2018-04-30 20:54:01, user Hunter Rice wrote:

      Hello,<br /> My name is Hunter and I am a graduate student in the Microbiology department at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Recently, we discussed your preprint article in a journal club on computational biology, and I wrote up my personal review of the article and included the comments posed by the class. We thought if there were any chance this might be of benefit to you, we should share it, so I’ve posted the review and comments below. I hope it is at least a little useful. Thank you for your contribution!

      Review of Muraro et al, 2018 (preprint), ‘Chronic inflammation delays cell migration to intestinal villi’

      Paper describes three alternative models, and their comparisons and implications, of the migration of epithelial cells from the recessed crypts of the small intestine (duodenum and ileum) toward the tips of adjacent villi. Specifically, they model the migration rate across three conditions: without disease, after acute inflammation (possibly wounding), and after and during chronic inflammation.

      Data for parameter estimation comes from experiments done with C57BL/6 mice. Cell proliferation and migration was tracked with BrdU. Experimental conditions were: 1) mice given 0.5mg/mL TNFa, 50mg/mL BrdU, sacrificed and sectioned/stained from 1-48hr pi, 2) mice given TNFa expression plasmid, monitored for 2 weeks for chronically high TNFa expression, then given BrdU, sacrificed and sectioned/stained 1-48hr post-BrdU. Number of cells stained for BrdU and position in villus quantified (Fig 2)

      Strengths of this paper:

      Conclusions from three models converged, supporting hypothesis that chronic inflammation can slow cell migration across the villus. This is significant because it suggests a mechanism by which chronic inflammation might be self-perpetuating or at least induce a positive-feedback loop, as the breakdown of the epithelium due to a decrease in cell flux would likely lead to further inflammation.

      This mathematical model combined with the experimental model may be useful in future attempts to dampen chronic inflammation specifically by targeting the factors involved in reducing cell migration in situations of chronic inflammation.

      Weaknesses of this paper:

      It seems that the major conclusion (Chronic inflammation delays cell migration to villus) could be arrived at without the mathematical model. Not that it is not useful, but if the paper did more to accentuate the novel conclusions facilitated by the modelling side, it might be easier to convince the reader of the importance of the computational approach.

      Comments (made by journal club):<br /> • Why age selection of mice? Clarification would be good for non-expert’s sake<br /> • Showing staining in figure would strengthen representation of methods in paper<br /> • Heaviside function representation is confusing on first viewing<br /> • Use of ‘BrdU’ instead of ‘control’ is confusing in both the text and Fig 2.<br /> • How were cells quantified? How did you control for differences in crypt-villus units?<br /> • Figure formats (no subfigure labels in fig2)

    1. On 2018-02-19 18:20:07, user J.J. Emerson wrote:

      Casey Bergman points out via Twitter (http://bit.ly/2HtIKOt) "http://bit.ly/2HtIKOt)") three previous examples of TE variation in substrains of ISO1 using various different methods:

      FISH: http://go.nature.com/2sDWW46<br /> Southerns/FISH/RT-PCR: http://bit.ly/2sDX03Q<br /> Genomic sequencing: http://bit.ly/2ED5RbU

      We will be incorporating these references into subsequent revisions of the manuscript. Thanks, Casey!

    1. On 2021-01-14 01:01:51, user Avant_Garde_1917 wrote:

      The proposed neurofeedback model was implemented on Python (with deep learning models implemented using pyTorch library) and run on a machine with an Intel i7 processor, NVIDIA GeForce 1050Ti GPU and 8 Gb RAM

      What on earth is this? Please repeat the experiment on modern technology. I checked the specs on the 1050Ti and this would be horrible at real time AI calculations.

      CUDA Cores 768 Graphics Clock 1290 MHz Processor Clock 1392 MHz Memory Interface GDDR5 VRAM 4 GB Memory Interface Width 128-bit Memory Bandwidth 112 GBps Tensor Cores No

      Compare that to an RTX 2080 Super, which is not even the current generation 30 series

      CUDA Cores 3072 Boost Clock 1815 MHz Memory Interface GDDR6 VRAM 8 GB Memory Interface Width 256-bit Memory Bandwidth 496 GBps Tensor Cores Yes

      I know everyone must have heard about new video cards. I would hope you have bought them by now. If not, then please do it. And if you have already bought them, then please repeat the experiment so that you can do a far more real time, higher quality image, at a higher resolution with less loss.

    1. On 2019-10-18 22:59:52, user Charles Warden wrote:

      I am still not entirely sure what I think about these metrics, but I think some of your experiences might be relevant to this discussion:

      https://www.biostars.org/p/...

      For example, are there situations that can increase the variability of reads obtained per sample? I think this mostly tends to happen when the desired number of reads per sample decreases, but that is not the only reason why reads might have to be combined between runs. However, if you are trying to barcode larger numbers of samples, then that seems relevant.

      Are you keeping track of the number of reads that go to unassigned barcodes (particularity if you make sure not to allow any index mismatches)? For example, do you consider it a "red flag" if you are getting 10,000s of reads for several unassigned barcodes and you only want 1,000 reads?

      As you design custom adapters, does that have any effect on the index quality scores? Are there situations where you have decided that a lane and/or run needed to be thrown out?

      Have you found common causes of situations that seem to make cross-contamination more likely? While it won't be a fair representation for recombination between similar sequences, have you tried things like having a unique spike-in for each sample (and then measuring how much of that spike in can actually be found in other samples)? I think this can noticeably vary between batches, but I don't believe that I have a satisfactory explanation that could predict / prevent this from happening (in general).

      It looks like all of the deposited data is for MiSeq. You also mention an issue with a tandem barcode limitation for NovaSeq, which I was not previously aware of.

      So, am I correct that you are primarily interested in decreasing the sample preparation costs (rather than trying to increase the number of samples processed per-lane)? If so, perhaps my initial impression is off. However, does that then mean that part of the goal is to decrease sample preparation costs (and avoid unnecessarily high sequencing depth) to make sequencing with a lower-throughput sequencer (probably within a lab) more appealing?

      More directly related to the paper, if you use this strategy to prepare MiSeq libraries, have you seen any indication of a maximal number of samples that you think should be processed per run? Based upon Figure 1, it seems like the biggest cost benefit occurs around 1000 samples.

      I apologize if I have missed something, but I am trying to get a sense of the robustness of the metrics provided for Hackflex over the course of 10-20 runs (and, ideally, if variation in metrics can occur as a function of the total number of samples that you try to process, or the types of libraries that you process). I am having a hard time answering the later question myself, but it seems like this might somewhat match your interests.

      Also, Supplemental Table 2 only goes up to 192 samples (and I only see Supplemental Table 2 and 8). So, I apologize, but I am not sure where I should be looking to see that there is no compromise in data quality if you process 1000 samples over 100-200 samples.

    1. On 2017-11-13 08:54:50, user James Lloyd wrote:

      Thank you for posting this interesting article about short ORFs in moss onto a pre-print server. I think that it is great that you have been able to identify sORFs throughout the transcriptome, classify them as uORFs, dORF etc and examine conservation and even find evidence for protein products for some, and function for one.

      Comments and questions:

      In Fig 1B, it would be nice to see another column describing how many sORFs were found in each classification from the computational pipeline, without evidence of expression or translation. Also, it would be best to right-align the numbers in the columns so that it is more obvious the magnitude of the differences at a glance.

      I like how Figures are integrated with the main text in this pre-print, it is rarely done, but I think that it would be better to change the legend text so it does not get confused with the main text so easily.

      dORFs are not explicitly described in the main text of the manuscript. There are times when genic-sORF is used, and others when CDS-sORFs is used - I think that they refer to the same group, if not, make that clearer. If they are the same group, they should be consistent. It is not quite clear what “intergenic-sORFs” are when intergenic-sORFs are also a group.

      CDS-sORFs are an interesting group that I had not considered. I take it that they use internal start codons in a different frame from the main ORF. Is there much evidence from other systems that they are real (eg ribo-seq data focusing on start codons to suggest those types of start codons are used)? Are the peptides from these vastly different from the protein of the main ORF? This is unclear in the manuscript and I think that a clearer explanation would help the reader appreciate the importance and validity of this.

      Line 143 has "(REF)", it was not clear initially that this was a abbreviation rather than shorthand for citation. Perhaps it is just me but changing this in some way might aid the reader, especially as it is most frequently used much later in the manuscript, after initial definition. I'm not actually sure randomly selected exon fragments needs to be shorten; not doing so would aid readability.

      Lines 175-176 "significantly fewer uORFs and dORFs in the two closest species", do you think that this could relate to the poorer genome/transcriptome assembly of these organisms relative to the others in the study? Perhaps ends of transcripts are less reliability reconstructed?

      In Fig 5, it might be worth adding "WT", "OX" and "KO" to the respective panels to save the reading having to look between the legend and the images.

      Line 681 and other places: "custom-made python scripts (available upon request)", it would be ideal if these scripts could be placed on GitHub or deposited on something like Zenodo (or maybe FigShare)? With Zenodo you can get a DOI to reference. Even if the code has not been tidied up for maximum re-use, I still think that this would be the best thing to do.

      I could not see any list of global sORF classification (uORF, dORF etc), position (genomic coordinates and linked gene when possible) and whether it is conserved in other species or not. I think that such a list would be extremely useful. I know that I would use it to aid some of my future analysis in moss data.

    1. On 2021-04-18 23:46:37, user Yury Barbitoff wrote:

      Dear Charles,

      thank you for your interest in our research!

      The filtering settings used for "hard filtering" in our work are similar to the ones you provided in your comment; however, we use more parameters for filtering as suggested by the GATK Best Practices workflow. SNPs and indels are processed separately accoring to this guideline: https://gatk.broadinstitute...

      It is possible that your settings allow for an increase in the F1 Score - and we may check using our dataset. At the same time, we believe that our work is not the first one to demonstrate that unfiltered GATK calls show higher F1 score (DeepVariant authors came to the same conclusion in their comparison, and so did the Zhao et al., 2020 study; 10.1038/s41598-020-77218-4). It is possible, however, that these observations are made because of the same "overtuning" issue - it may apply not only to deep learning models such as DeepVariant, but to conventional calling methods as well (because all evaluation is basically performed using the same set of samples :)). I can tell from my personal experience in working with patients' exome data that filtering in GATK does substantially decrease the recall, at least when using the setiings we've tried - we had several cases with the causal variant being filtered out, and these were rather unpleasant cases. That's one reason why we try to pay the reader's attention to the filtering issues for medical purposes.

      As for your suggestion regarding the direct proof of overfitting/overtuning problem - this is something we're working on at the moment, so thank you for your suggestions! We have not yet found a perfect dataset to work with yet, so testing the issue may take some time.

      Sincerely,<br /> Yury

    1. On 2016-07-19 05:30:05, user Frederic Bastian wrote:

      Great work! <br /> p.3: "In addition to lexical criteria, we use ontology structure criteria." "The rules above do not exhaustively cover all cases" "code on GitHub for details"<br /> I would be interested in getting more details about the lexical/ontology structure criteria used to generate prior probabilities. Could you point to where to find this information in the github project?

    1. On 2019-11-26 16:58:25, user Vahe Demirjian wrote:

      The chasmosaurine specimens YPM 2016 and AMNH 5402 are interpreted as more similar to Vagaceratops irvinensis by Campbell et al. (2019), who remove these specimens from Chasmosaurus belli and place Vagaceratops back in Chasmosaurus.

      Campbell, J. A., Ryan, M. J., Schroder-Adams, C. J., Holmes, R. B., & Evans, D. C. (2019). Temporal range extension and evolution of the chasmosaurine ceratopsid ‘Vagaceratops’ irvinensis (Dinosauria: Ornithischia) in the Upper Cretaceous (Campanian) Dinosaur Park Formation of Alberta. Vertebrate Anatomy Morphology Palaeontology, 7, 83-100. https://doi.org/10.18435/va...

    1. On 2023-02-22 12:31:33, user Felix Bäuerlein wrote:

      Review on manuscript

      The intention of this review is to improve the scientific approach and to help the authors improve the manuscript and not to attack anyone personally!

      It is a very important challenge, to develop cryo-FocusedIonBeam/ElectronTomography (cryo-FIB/ET) technology further to be able to investigate not only single cells but also patient derived tissues. <br /> The authors attempt in their manuscript to address mouse and human brain tissue by cryo-ElectronMicroscopy (cryo-EM) - tomography is aimed in the future.<br /> Several groups attempt to do cryo-FIB/ET on tissue with different technical and sample preparation techniques. In our recent review [Bäuerlein & Baumeister (2021) JMB https://doi.org/10.1016/j.j...] we address the challenges that need to be taken.

      In this present manuscript the authors successfully manage a lamella preparation in brain tissue with an approach developed in 2014. <br /> Despite a technical solid approach the sample choice, retrieval and preparation are key to the molecular interpretation of cryo-EM studies! Here I see serious major issues with the sample retrieval and preparation. Besides a technical good approach, the sample preparation is at least as important, to be able to draw high resolution conclusions from the imaging data.

      MAJOR ISSUE 1: <br /> In the presented manuscript here, the way of preparation of human brain (post-mortem, ischemic due to long lasting anoxia (8.3h!), chemical fixation) doesn’t allow conclusive interpretations at molecular resolution - particularly not investigating neurodegeneration, which the authors project to do! In our recent review [Bäuerlein & Fernandez-Busnadiego & Baumeister, (2020) TICB https://doi.org/10.1016/j.t...] we argue why post-mortem, anoxic brain tissue should NOT be chosen for the interpretation at high-resolution for the investigation of neurodegenerative diseases:

      „However, postmortem tissue is not suitable for high-resolution studies, as brain tissue is extremely sensitive to anoxia and rapidly develops into brain death due to global ischemia in the dying patient. Irreversible cerebral damage develops rapidly, leading to a drastic decrease of survival in minutes if an individual is not resuscitated [92]. Furthermore, the chance of a favorable neurological outcome of a surviving patient after 30 min of resuscitation is vanishingly low [93], indicating major neuronal damage. Substantial structural alterations, affecting most organelles and cytosolic structures, have been observed in the first minutes to hours after global ischemia [94–97]. And importantly, cerebral ischemic injury and neurodegenerative disorders share many commonalities [94]. Thus, studies using high-resolution methods on postmortem tissue [98,99] image a cellular situation in which the neurodegenerative pathologies cannot be distinguished from postmortem artifacts and should thus be taken with caution.“

      Brain tissue is the most sensitive tissue to anoxia in the human body - several minutes of hypoxia (stroke, heart arrest) cause first structural changes in minutes and typically causes irreversible ischemic damage to neurons. Thus the term „excellent tissue quality“ is more than questionable, many hours of anoxia like in this study (8.3h). Since cryo-EM offers molecular resolution the condition of the sample must be strictly close-to-physiological, which can reasonably not be expected many hours under anoxic conditions.

      The authors conclude however an „excellent tissue quality“ with stating a tissue pH of 6.3. I wonder what the term ‚quality‘ here refers to!? <br /> Under physiological conditions the intracellular pH is narrowly buffered to typically 7.2, the cells surrounding CSF (an ultra-filtrate of the blood) is typically around 7.35. An acidosis with values below a pH of 6.8 is incompatible with life - so how can a brain tissue pH of 6.3 be interpreted as “excellent tissue quality” in terms of physiological vitality, which is essential if high-resolution interpretations want to be made?

      In contrast to the authors interpretation I suspect this brain sample to be seriously ischemic, degraded, acidic and simply dead, which are normal processes post-morten and thus a more than suboptimal target for high resolution analyses! And importantly, cerebral ischemic injury and neurodegenerative disorders share many commonalities [Nikonenko (2009) Anat. Rec.].

      MAJOR ISSUE 2: <br /> In it’s adequate use - by cryo-fixation - cryo-EM enables the investigation of the cellular context at molecular resolution in a close-to-native state.<br /> The authors chemically fix the human post-mortem brain, which causes structural alterations at the molecular level [Gilkey & Staehelin (1986) J. Electron Microsc. Tech] and thus dissipates any of the favorable advantages of cryo-EM. In Fig 5 all panels show ‚empty‘ white spaces in the micrographs indicating precipitatation of soluble proteins on membranes and the cytoskeleton. Fig. 5 actually has an appearance almost like a dehydrated, resin embedded sample and looks quite untypical for cryo-preserved tissue. Also the contrast of these micrographs appears quite untypical for cryo-EM micrographs. The comparison of chemically fixed brain in Fig 5 to the not fixed mouse brain sample in Fig 4 visualizes the strong alterations chemical fixation introduces on the molecular level. Thus taken together the title of this Fig 5 „Ultrastructural preservation“ is likely exaggerated!

      MAJOR ISSUE 3: <br /> The major prerequisite for the ultrastructural preservation of intact cells and tissues is the vitrification of the biological matter. This means the absence of water-ice crystallinity. Sadly the authors offer no proof of absence of hexagonal ice crystallinity in their manuscript - this definitely is a must. In Fig 4B there are indications of crystalline water ice: corresponding black and white diffraction patterns also called Bragg diffraction patterns seem to be present here. This indicates that larger parts of the mouse brain sample might not be vitrified.

      MAJOR ISSUE 4: <br /> The standard way to represent microscopic data in the cryo-ET field is at least a slice of a tomographic reconstruction to not be biased by superimposing structures in the three-dimensional lamella or membranes that are only visible when looking at an angle which is near parallel to the membrane sheets. Here I am very surprised to exclusively see 2D projection images - this is very untypical and doesn’t support the fact, that the whole aimed cryo-ET pipeline works. Why is there not a single tomogram shown? The figure caption in Fig 4 claims the left panel as tomographic slices however they very much appear as simple projection micrographs. I would definitely show at least slices from 3D reconstructions and not 2D projections - this is minimal standard in the cryo-ET community.<br /> For example, conclusions drawn like in Fig 5 C) are not substantiated: How can the authors be certain in the interpretation that this structure is a ribosome-associated VESICLE without any 3D information - this might just be an ER tube extending in the z-direction which was cut off to top and bottom by FIB-milling?

      Besides this I am stunned to read in the methods section that for a single projection, an excessive dose of 100 e/Å^2 was necessary - this is a dose typical for an entire Tilt-series acquisition with about 30-50 projections - is that maybe the reason why a tilt-series could not be recorded to reconstruct a tomogram?

      MINOR POINTS:<br /> Furthermore I would love to see some typical overviews of entire lamellae - this could give a nice impression of the cellular context and also show how well the H-bar cryo-FIB preparation works.

      It would also be helpful for the community, if the authors share their most representative data on EMDB (Electron Microscopy Data Bank) - this is common practice in the field.

      CONCLUSION:<br /> Thus, in conclusion the technical approach is interesting but as lined out there are several major issues - leading the use of ischemic, post-mortem, heavily anoxic brain tissue, and chemical fixation which each separately are incompatible sample preparations for high resolution imaging as intended with cryo-ET. We emphasized the importance of the sample quality in our review in Trends in Cell Biology.

      Major issue with the perspective of the authors future intentions:<br /> The authors plan to do sub-tomogram averaging of post-mortem patients brains with this work-flow - a very well-meant advise: this is not going to be successful! Chemical fixation denaturates proteins which alone will make sub-tomogram averaging rather meaningless.

      Furthermore, the biological/medical conclusions drawn from protein functional states, concentrations, distributions and so on, will be very questionable when imaged in the dying, heavily ischemic brain (after some hours, there will likely not be a single neuron alive). Necrosis, apoptosis, breakdown of all membrane potentials and gradients, depletion of ATP, protein degradation and many more processes will be governed by this - so how does one want to separate the effects of death from disease mechanisms during the lifetime of the patient?

      Thus this approach needs to be profoundly reevaluated, when questions about disease mechanisms of neurological and psychiatric conditions are the target!

    1. On 2018-11-27 08:10:26, user Klaus Fiedler wrote:

      The similarity of Wnt - p24-GOLD domain interaction shown here to XWnt8 -<br /> Fz8-CRD interaction seen in the cited work [32] can be observed when <br /> comparing the figure 2A of Janda et al.

    1. On 2024-01-22 17:35:49, user Mohieddin Jafari wrote:

      After reviewing your paper, I found it to be a little bit confusing. In the first Figure, you reference Fargpipe and DIA-NN, but the case studies appear to be centered around Spectronut. Moreover, it's unclear in the "Mass Spectrophotometry Methods" section which specific case study you are addressing. Do you have any updated version of this manuscript?

    1. On 2018-06-12 20:25:38, user Luke Evans wrote:

      Dear Drs. Balding and Speed,

      Thank you for your comments on our preprint. We agree that LD can play an important role in phenotypic variation. In our revision, now published in Nature Genetics (link above), we performed a wide range of simulations to explore the influence of LD-dependent architecture on estimates of SNP-heritability across a wide range of estimation models, including the Speed et al. 2017 and Yang et al. 2015 models. Importantly, we included simulations based on an LD-based model (Gazal et al. 2017 Nature Genetics) that is independent of the Yang or the Speed models.

      We confirmed that under a range of conditions, all the models can be biased. However, stratifying the markers by MAF and individual SNP LD scores (GREML-LDMS-I, which we introduce in the published manuscript) provides the least biased estimates across all simulated phenotypes, and provides the most accurate picture of genetic architecture across the entire range of LD-dependent and LD-independent architectures.

      We believe that these additional simulations, included in the revised and published manuscript, address the LD issues you raised in your comments.

      We look forward to continuing the discussion of SNP-heritability and genetic architecture.

      Luke Evans, Institute for Behavioral Genetics, University of Colorado

    1. On 2022-08-14 20:38:52, user Ricardo M. Biondi wrote:

      With my colleague Alejandro E. Leroux we have written an extended commentary with our opinion on the work, which can be found in the link: https://www.qeios.com/read/....<br /> In short, we find that the authors do not properly cite previous work, notably the Gao and Harris paper (2006) that reaches similar conclusions. In addition, the introduction fails to acknowledge even basic issues. For example, the classical PKCs are constitutively phosphorylated by PDK1 without growth factor signaling. Akt/PKB becomes phosphorylated by PDK1 in a PI3-kinase dependent manner but also has been described to become phosphorylated by PDK1 in a PI3-kinase INDEPENDENT manner. In contrast to what Levina et al. indicate in the introduction, a model to explain PDK1 phosphorylation of substrates must take into consideration that some substrates are phosphorylated in a PIP3-independent manner! <br /> For a detailed commentary on the results section, again I recommend that you go to the qeios link above. Most of the hard biochemistry in the paper is dedicated to describing the dimer that must be formed along the very very slow process of trans-autophosphorylation in vitro. The hard-core biochemical studies are based on a fusion of PDK1 to PIF. It is difficult to understand what useful information can be obtained from those "dimers"... PIF binds with high affinity to PDK1: what would be the sense of crosslinking GST-PIF to PDK1? would you obtain any information about the GST/ PDK1 heterodimers??? If the model was correct, PIFtide should inhibit trans-autophosphorylation. The authors did not do this control experiment. But it was done previously: this was NOT observed in the paper by Frödin et al (2000). So the dimer model with an important hydrophobic motif binding to the PIF-pocket in the neighbour molecule is very likely incorrect. Finally the authors claim autoinhibition by the PH domain and release of this autoinhibition by PIP3. I have not yet seen any convincing data to support the existence of an autoinhibited PDK1. Please, refer to the qeios link for further details. In short, I believe that the conclusion of this part of the work is also not supported by their data nor by 25 years of careful work by different laboratories.

    1. On 2025-06-17 07:28:32, user Valters Abolins wrote:

      Very interesting article - thank you for investigating this topic. I have a comment on the methodology that, in my opinion, might affect your results. In previous studies, it has been shown that finger interdependence tends to increase during isometric steady-state force production tasks (e.g., Hirose et al., 2020; Abolins et al., 2020, 2023). In your analysis, the time window used to calculate forces appears to vary from trial to trial. This variability may affect the assessment of interdependence and related force measures. Have you examined whether finger interdependence changes over time in your data? I believe this would be an important point to consider when interpreting your findings.

      References:

      Hirose, J., Cuadra, C., Walter, C., & Latash, M. L. (2020). Finger interdependence and unintentional force drifts: Lessons from manipulations of visual feedback. Human Movement Science, 74, 102714.

      Abolins, V., Stremoukhov, A., Walter, C., & Latash, M. L. (2020). On the origin of finger enslaving: Control with referent coordinates and effects of visual feedback. Journal of Neurophysiology, 124(6), 1625–1636.

      Abolins, V., Ormanis, J., & Latash, M. L. (2023). Unintentional drifts in performance during one-hand and two-hand finger force production. Experimental Brain Research, 241(3), 699–712.

    1. On 2016-10-30 19:33:46, user ohwilleke wrote:

      There are a few grammatical issues with the abstract: "schizophrenia brain" should be "schizophrenic brain"; "while participants performing the working memory task" should read "while participants are performing the working memory task"; "discrimination performances of pattern classifier machine trained" should read "the discrimination performance of the pattern classifier machine trained"; "classifier machine trained by time-lagging patterns of low frequency fluctuation (LFF) produced highest classifying accuracy than the machines" should read "the classifier machine trained by time-lagging patterns of low frequency fluctuation (LFF) produced the highest classification accuracy relative to the machines"; "classifier machine trained by coherence pattern in LFF band also made better performance than the machine trained by correlation-based connectivity pattern.", should read "the classifier machine trained by coherence patterns in the LFF band also performed better than the machine trained by a correlation-based connectivity pattern"; "These results indicate that there have been unwatched but important features in the functional connectivity pattern of schizophrenia brain on which traditional emphasis on correlation analysis could not capture." should read "These results indicate that there are unobserved but important features in the functional connectivity patterns of schizophrenic brains which the traditional emphasis on correlation analysis does not capture."

    1. On 2025-02-21 00:46:47, user Hurrian Fan wrote:

      Congratulations to the team on some amazing work! The steppe component visible in East_steppe_Sets in Chalcolithic and Bronze Age western Anatolia is modeled with Yamnaya, CWC, and Bell Beaker, which are chronologically and geographically somewhat improbable for the early samples. <br /> Have the authors considered checking potentially more proximal sources of potential steppe ancestry, such as the Kartal A & B clusters from Penske et al 2023?

      The subclades of y-hg I-L699 found in the Kulluoba and Kalehoyuk samples are not only shared with Serednii Stih individuals, but also Cernavoda (KTL001 & KTL006) and Thracian EBA individuals (Bul4 & I2165), which might lend some plausibility to this source.

    1. On 2023-08-12 19:35:33, user Charles Warden wrote:

      Hi,

      Thank you very much for posting this preprint.

      This comment relates to the methodology and my personal experience.

      Essentially, I have a number of data types (SNP Chip, Exome, Illumina Whole Genome Sequencing, and PacBio HiFi Whole Genome Sequencing for myself). You can see part of those results if you scroll down to "Raw Re-Analysis for HLA Typing" on this page.

      My HLA-A, HLA-B, and HLA-C (which I believe are the "class I" HLA genes) had consistent results that I believe can be reliable.

      However, at least for myself, I had concerns about the SNP chip imputations for HLA-DRB1, HLA-DQA1, and HLA-DQB1 (which I believe are the "class II" HLA genes). The Introduction and Supplemental Tables have HLA-DRB1 results, and that is part of why I wanted to post this comment.

      If I am correctly understanding that this paper makes noticeable use of SNP chip imputations, then I have the following questions:

      1) If I do a quick literature search, I think my own results may be consistent with Pappas et al. 2018 (but perhaps less so with Karnes et al. 2017). While I had to learn more about HLA/MHC genes, I think it may make sense that it should be easier to make assignments for some genes over others. Do you agree or disagree with that conclusion?

      2) I thought SNP2HLA and HIBAG were relatively common methods for HLA imputations from SNP chip data. However, is there another method available where I can test generating HLA imputations for my sample and see if they are more consistent with the sequencing results (for the "class II" HLA genes)?

      If I understand correctly, the GitHub page for this publication describes using SNP2HLA (which I don't think gave reliable imputations for HLA-DRB1, HLA-DQA1, and HLA-DQB1 with my SNP chip data, either for 23andMe or Genes for Good). However, even if that is true, I don't know if the precise settings can have a noticeable effect on the HLA imputation results?

      Thank you very much!

      Sincerely,<br /> Charles

    1. On 2024-02-01 02:33:33, user Tania Gonzalez wrote:

      This pre-print is now peer-reviewed, edited, and published at Biology of Reproduction. Main data stays the same so these pre-print supplemental spreadsheets are safe to use. For the final version, we added details on the specific genes used to identify decidua "contamination" during quality control, combined numbers of protein coding and long noncoding genes (the pre-print mostly focused on protein coding only), included a comparison to our single cell RNA-seq (Sun et al 2020), added immunofluorescence for select genes, and added more about the biological significance of our results. [PMID: 38271627] https://doi.org/10.1093/bio...

    1. On 2020-05-17 04:59:32, user Fraser Lab wrote:

      I am posting this review on behalf of a student from a class at UCSF on peer review: https://fraserlab.com/peer_... . The student wishes to remain anonymous. I will be happy to act as an intermediary for any correspondence.

      The goal of this paper is to engineer an optogenetic circuit that provides low noise and allows single-cell gene expression control in mammalian cells. The authors 1) engineered the light-inducible tuner (LITer) system and illustrated that incorporating negative feedback into optogenetic circuits can drastically reduce noise, and 2) applied the LITer system to achieve expression control of KRAS gene and explored the biological functions of KRAS in cell proliferation.

      The authors characterized the LITer system using different light intensities and illumination conditions, exploring the dose-response, the linearity, and the efficiency of the system. One other important and distinct feature of the optogenetic system is reversibility that can provide flexible control of gene expression. The authors didn’t mention or do any characterization of the reversibility of the system in the paper. Adding a reversibility test would thoroughly highlight a potential advantage of the LITer system.

      By comparing the performance of the LITer system with a benchmark tool LightOn, the authors observed 4- to 5-fold noise reduction in the LITer system. The authors proposed three sources of the noise reduction, including negative feedback, fast kinetics of LOV2, and the advantage of monomer over dimer. I think the authors could provide more evidence about each of their hypotheses. For example, to validate how the kinetics of optogenetic tools affect the noise reduction, they can use computational modeling to explore the different kinetic parameters, combining with experimental validation to see how changing those parameters will affect the performance of the system.

      To test their new tool, the authors adapted the LITer system to control the expression of KRAS, where they showed that the level of KRAS and the downstream ERK phosphorylation could be fine regulated by different light intensities. By doing a cell count experiment, they found that after light illumination, the cell number decreases. The authors thus concluded that low KRAS level may maximize cell growth, while higher KRAS may lead to senescence. Several controls and supporting experiments could strengthen this claim:

      They could measure KRAS and phosphorylated ERK concentration in parental cells to make sure the range of KRAS level in LITer-KRAS cells is comparable with that of the parental cells. <br /> They could perform cell number counting before the light stimulation as a control to make sure cells of different cell types or treated with different light intensities have the same initial count. Otherwise, the cell number count after illumination isn’t normalized. Moreover, they showed in the supplement the cell counting results under different light intensities from 0 up to 500 g.s. The number of parental cells fluctuates a lot under different light conditions, which makes their claim that light does not affect the growth of parental cells questionable. The authors tried to normalize the cell count results by calculating the ratio of the LITer-KRAS cells to the parental cells, but they didn’t do any statistical analysis. <br /> They pointed out in the paper that they tried to validate that the observed effects were due to KRAS induction and not light alone by using chemical inductions. Quite interestingly they only showed that doxycycline can induce KRAS expression and phospho-ERK, but didn’t put any cell proliferation results. Adding these results might be a convincing argument, if they also observe decreased cell number after doxycycline induction.

      In general, the major success of the paper is that they engineered and characterized the LITer system that showed significant noise reduction compared to the benchmark LightOn system. Moreover, through computational modeling they found the reason for the high expression level of the system and made further improvements leading to LITer2.0, which shows lower basal expression level and better linearity. The major weakness of the paper is that they lack some important control and supporting experiments to support their conclusion about the biological functions of KRAS.

      In summary, the LITer system that the authors engineered will allow precise and spatiotemporal control of gene expression for biological researches, with potential improvement to the dynamic fold change by using more efficient optogenetic tools.

      Minor points:<br /> 1. Why not use the same duration of illumination for both LITer and LightOn systems when doing the comparison? Both systems seem to reach saturation after 12h illumination.<br /> 2. The deterministic and stochastic model seem to have similar results according to the paper. Is there a reason why they want to use both methods for computational modeling?<br /> 3. It would help the reader understand the circuit they engineered better if they can put the detailed gene circuits shown in supporting Figure S1 into Figure 1 and 3 in the paper.<br /> 4. The x-axes of Figure 2J and Figure 5H should be 0, 50, and 100 since the unit is percent (%).<br /> 5. In the supplement where they explain the deterministic models, R should stand for ???????????????? or Tet Repressor but not TetR Repressor.

    1. On 2017-05-17 18:05:53, user Chris McCown wrote:

      Is there any chance that you're interpreting the mixture data backwards?<br /> Everything about the R1a/R1b split and their subsequent phylogeny <br /> suggests that it migrated outward from NW Europe to the Steppe and not <br /> from the Steppe to Europe. For example, you attempt to connect R1b to <br /> Beaker migration approximately 4K YBP, yet R1b1 aDNA was found in <br /> Northern Italy 14K years ago. If I understand your paper correctly, you<br /> say that Iberians are missing Steppe ancestry. I contend that is <br /> because admixing further east in Europe then migrated to the Steppe <br /> rather than Steppe migrating to Europe Have you considered this <br /> possibility? See Big Picture Migration Map: <br /> http://www.anthrogenica.com...

    1. On 2018-04-29 17:16:53, user Premendra wrote:

      Deeper study of the article poses major difficulties. Let us see this paragraph:

      “Third, between 3100-2200 BCE we observe an outlier at the BMAC site of Gonur, as well as two outliers from the eastern Iranian site of Shahr-i-Sokhta, all with an ancestry profile similar to 41 ancient individuals from northern Pakistan who lived approximately a millennium later in the isolated Swat region of the northern Indus Valley (1200-800 BCE). These individuals had between 14-42% of their ancestry related to the AASI and the rest related to early Iranian agriculturalists and West_Siberian_HG. Like contemporary and earlier samples from Iran/Turan we find no evidence of Steppe-pastoralist-related ancestry in these samples. In contrast to all other Iran/Turan samples, we find that these individuals also had negligible Anatolian agriculturalist-related admixture, suggesting that they might be migrants from a population further east along the cline of decreasing Anatolian agriculturalist ancestry.” (Narasimhan 2018 bioRxiv: page 9 lines 276 to 285).

      This paragraph provides us with two crucial pieces of information:<br /> 1. The Gonur and Shahr-i-Sokhta samples dated from 3100 BC to 2200 BC had no evidence of the Steppe-pastoralist-related ancestry in them.<br /> 2. These Gonur and Shahr-i-Sokhta people had the same ancestry profile as the 41 ancient individuals from northern Pakistan living between 1200 BC and 800 BC.

      Impression from these two findings: This gives the most parsimonious impression that the ancestry or the genetic profile of the people from North Pakistan, Indus-Harappa proper and the Greater Indus Valley which included the regions up to east Iran and southern Turkmenistan had a genetic continuum in space and time, and they all were the same people. There is nothing in the article to prevent this conclusion being accepted to be as valid as the one considered by the authors.

      1. These people (Gunur, Shahr-i-Sokhta, Swat etc North Pakistan, henceforth called GSP) had negligible ancestry from Anatolia.

      2. These people (GSP) had not arrived from steppe-pastoralist culture of the Late Bronze Age. (explicitly expressed).

      Impression from points 3 and 4 : There was no arrival from either the Neolithic Anatolian farmers, nor had been any arrivals from the steppe-pastoralist cultural location, prior to or up to 800 BC.

      Now let us look at the definition of the word AASI used in the quoted paragraph. It is ““Ancient Ancestral South Indian (AASI)-related”: a hypothesized South Asian Hunter-Gatherer lineage related deeply to present-day indigenous Andaman Islanders” (lines 204-205). This means that the Indians (both North and South) had a hunter-gatherer population whose ancestry had been exactly the same as the present day Andaman islanders before 8th millennium BC, the time of arrival of Neolithic in India. It also by implication means that Andaman Islanders and the Hunter-Gatherer Ancient Indians had not diverged genetically at all in spite of having been separated genetically and spatially for 30,000 to 60,000 years. Another important thing to understand here is that this new name AASI means the same thing as the ASI coined by Reich (2010). In other words, Narasimhan assumes that the Andaman Islanders like people (ASI) had occupied the whole of India, and were not restricted to the south India before the Neolithic, and hence they have been given a new name AASI replacing the older name ASI.

      However this assumption cannot be supported on the basis of received information so far. We know from the data supplied by the Narasimhan article as well as earlier articles by various authors that the Y-DNA haplogroup of the Andaman Islanders had stayed the same--the oldest Asian ones---D1 and C2. On the other hand people who had stayed in the mainland India had developed newer haplogroups like F*, C5, H1 etc in their Y-DNA profile, and these newer Y-DNAs have largely replaced the oldest lineages D1 and C2 in the mainland India by this time. Hence the identification of the pre-Neolithic Indians by modern Andaman Islanders gene is essentially flawed, and is fraught with the dander of misleading the entire study towards wrong conclusions.

      Now we should examine another statement regarding the GSP population: “These individuals had between 14-42% of their ancestry related to the AASI and the rest related to early Iranian agriculturalists and West_Siberian_HG.” (lines 279 to 281).

      This statement at least confirms that the early Iranian agriculturists were genetically related to the GPS (Bronze Age Gonur, Shahr-i-Sokhta, North Pakistan) people. Although Narasimhan et al assume that the Zagros Iranian agriculturists (ZIA) were ancestral to the GPS, there is another possibility that that the GPS and Zagros IA had descended from a common ancestor who was located more likely in Pakistan or Eastern Iran than in the Zagros.

      The latter possibility is supported by stouter evidence. It has been noted that there was a genetic discontinuity, a break in the cline, between the Zagros people and the Anatolian farmers of the 7th millennium BC (Lazaridis 2016; Broushaki 2016). Such break is produced always by either a new arrival of a population, or an insurmountable long time geographical barrier between two adjacent populations. Broushaki had studied the Wezmeh sample from another Zagros cave. Broushaki noted,

      “We sequenced Early Neolithic genomes from the Zagros region of Iran (eastern Fertile Crescent), where some of the earliest evidence for farming is found, and identify a previously uncharacterized population that is neither ancestral to the first European farmers nor has contributed significantly to the ancestry of modern Europeans. These people are estimated to have separated from Early Neolithic farmers in Anatolia some 46-77,000 years ago and show affinities to modern day Pakistani and Afghan populations, but particularly to Iranian Zoroastrians.” (Abstract). Thus, the Wezmeh DNA seems to be a part of wider Indo-Iranian ancient pool, having maximum concentration in Pakistan as in this picture.”

      Narasimhan and his colleagues have not assimilated this finding into their discussion, which could have changed the conclusions.

    1. On 2019-12-12 13:56:01, user Rosemary Noblin wrote:

      Altered phenotypes is the key term in this article. It’s as simple as understanding that every living thing carries its own vibration. It’s stands to reason based on that alone that altering a living state will change its forces. Has NOTHING to do with being a vegan or “tree hugger” for those that comment ignorantly.

    1. On 2022-05-12 15:43:02, user L. Collado Torres wrote:

      Hi,

      Congratulations on getting this project to the pre-print finish line! Kudos to you!

      Given some of my research projects, I'll need to read in detail your pre-print as I find it very interesting. That's why I made a feature request (FR) on GitHub asking for a documentation website or information on how to use GPSA https://github.com/andrewch.... I might have missed it, and look forward to further interacting with you. As you are likely acutely aware, sometimes testing software in a different computational system or dataset might reveal some bugs or potential new feature requests. I recognized that you have implemented a GitHub Actions workflow and automatically test your software https://github.com/andrewch... on Python 3.8, which is formidable. As I'm a Python novice, I don't know if there's an equivalent to covr in R (https://CRAN.R-project.org/... "https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=covr)") for code coverage.

      On the pre-print itself, I greatly appreciate how you've shared all appendixes, and in particular, I love sections 6.1 and 6.2 where you described where you got the datasets you analyzed and link to the code you used, respectively. I would further encourage you to deposit your code at a permanent repository like Zenodo or Figshare (or even bioRxiv) since code can be deleted from GitHub. You'll get a DOI that you can cite in an update pre-print or peer-reviewed version of your manuscript.

      While I'll need external help and/or quite a bit of time to understand your mathematical models, I also like how you have described it in detail.

      I'll repeat here (and edit) some of my questions I asked publicly on Twitter & live during Andrew Jones' talk at #BoG22:

      * Would you be interested in trying out your method in our 2021 data with spatially-adjacent replicates?<br /> * How far can you go in µm? We have some replicates 300 µm apart. (Jean Fan from JHU BME asked the same question framing it as a Z-axis distance question).<br /> * Can you combine H&E + smFISH images?<br /> * For the future studies that you described, what contingencies are you considering for cases where an intermediate tissue slide has a technical problem like tissue folding?

      I recognize that these questions are beyond the code of this pre-print and will likely be answered elsewhere.

      If it helps, we would be happy to chat with you about our data we have publicly available and some that we are also generating.

      Best,<br /> Leonardo

    1. On 2023-09-12 12:46:54, user LEVIn - Unicamp wrote:

      We discussed this preprint in our journal club and enjoyed reading it. We collectively agreed it's a stimulating contribution to understanding how individual specialization emerges and is maintained in natural populations. Most of the literature on the causes of individual specialization focuses on the ecological (i.e., extrinsic) causes of this phenomenon (sensu Araújo et al. 2011 Ecology Letters), while the proximate causes (e.g., functional trade-offs, social status) have surprisingly been little studied. Part of this discrepancy is due to the challenges of testing whether and how individuals' intrinsic traits influence their trophic preferences. This preprint adds a novel level of complexity to the field by quantifying (i) the relative contribution of largely overlooked proximate causes (social learning, maternal effects, genetic factors) and (ii) the simultaneous effects of ecological (i.e., environment context) and proximate causes. We were positively impressed by the quality of the data and statistical analyses during our discussion. The resolution and temporal extent of the data used are unprecedented in the literature, and the Bayesian framework implemented is thorough. As we appreciated the quantitative approaches, our discussion focused mainly on how the question is motivated in the introduction and the major implications of the results. We agreed that the introduction outlines well how the measured factors are expected to drive individual heterogeneity. Still, a more general framing of the research questions could make the manuscript more appealing to a broader and more diverse readership. For instance, the introduction begins by explaining that environmental factors are key drivers of trophic niche variation. However, unraveling how individuality emerges in natural systems, by nature and/or nurture, is a general question that is still widely open in different areas of science - and we believe this manuscript provides exciting results in this regard. In the discussion, the fact that maternal learning, maternal effect, and environment combined explain most of the variance in trophic position (lines 297-299) could be further explored to emphasize the importance of simultaneously studying proximate and ecological causes of individual specialization. Also, the sizable residual observed in the "Maternal learning" model suggests that understanding what generates trophic diversity within populations is far more complex than initially thought, particularly in species with complex social structures, creating a stimulating challenge for future studies. Congrats on this excellent manuscript, and good luck with the next steps of this work!

      Laboratório de Ecologia das Variações Individuais (LEVIn), State University of Campinas (Unicamp), Brazil

    1. On 2017-04-11 15:14:46, user Rahul Nahar wrote:

      We have seen such a phenomenon even on Hiseq2500 which also uses bridge amplification and thus I think it might be present on Nextseq 500 as well though may be to a slightly lower extent than Hiseq4000.

    1. On 2021-07-28 14:33:17, user CircaReader wrote:

      Interesting paper with exciting results. There are certainly valuable implications from these findings. After reading through, I had several comments that I thought I would share.

      1. Add legend to figure 1 x axis, “Days”. Perhaps p-day would be useful.
      2. Is it standard to have text labels describing the results as seen in figure 2?
      3. What is the purpose of the colored arrows in figure 2?
      4. What is meant by ‘significant trend’ in figure 2/4? What test was used to determine this? Probably will need to clarify this statement
    1. On 2021-08-25 07:27:33, user nemo peeters wrote:

      Dear Readers, A colleague has spotted a copy/paste error resulting in a yeast spot duplication in Fig1A. The new figure will be uploaded soon, together with a new supplementary material showing the raw Y2H matrices.

    1. On 2016-08-09 16:15:24, user Hansi Weißensteiner wrote:

      There's something wrong with that huge amount of NF. Not sure if related to the previously issues in the VCF file (not present anymore on the 1000G ftp site - I was in contact with the 1000G Project Helpdesk last year in this regard, find here the file: https://dbis-owncloud.uibk.... ). A simple check: download http://ftp.1000genomes.ebi.... - upload it in HaploGrep2: http://haplogrep.uibk.ac.at/ Export as "Haplogroup Extended (txt)" The column "Not_Found_Polys" contains the "false negatives" - 8860 however not found as the most contributing one to the high number of FNs. Reflected in this report is the high fluctuation rate of 16189, 152, ... best, Hansi

    1. On 2021-10-26 02:41:51, user CDSL JHSPH wrote:

      Thank you for sharing your research. I found the paper to be very well-structured and I think the organized layout of the paper helps build a narrative that can be read by a wider, non-scientific audience as well. <br /> It was interesting to find that neutrophils in older adults had increased uptake and oxidative capacity, compared to younger adults (Fig 2B). I liked that you referenced research articles with findings that were in contrast to your own finding regarding neutrophil oxidative capacity in older adults. I think including such references is a great way to avoid confirmation bias in research.<br /> I hope to see future studies that build upon this research theme by using cohorts that span the entire age range of 1-80 years. It would also be interesting to see the variation in dendritic cells and B cells at human nasal mucosa with age. In addition to the challenge of obtaining human tissue samples, did you face any other challenges while investigating the immune cell composition at nasal mucosa? Also, were there any factors that led you to focus mainly on T cells and neutrophils for this study?

    1. On 2019-01-24 06:05:11, user Huxley Mae wrote:

      In my opinion, aflatoxins contamination to foodstuff is critical to human health, hence, fast and accurate methods of for aflatoxins production are inevitable, This method represents an alternative approach to determine aflatoxin production from Aspergillus species and can be impactful. Once improved it can be helpful in assessing the Aspergillus spp. interaction in terms of toxins production that is essential prior to use of such fungal spp. as biological control

    1. On 2025-04-04 13:16:05, user Eva-Maria Geigl wrote:

      We agree with the conclusion that the Bell Beaker groups formed locally in (north)western Europe. We proposed last year a similar model in our Science Advances article “Parasayan, O., Laurelut, C., Bole, C., Bonnabel, L., Corona, A., Domenech-Jaulneau, C., Paresys, C., Richard, I., Grange, T., Geigl, E.-M. (2024) Late Neolithic collective burial reveals admixture dynamics during the third millennium BCE and the shaping of the European genome Sci. Adv. 10, eadl2468 (2024). Doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adl2468”. We proposed local formation of Bell Beaker groups in northern France starting ~2600 BCE in a Late Neolithic archaeological context (“Néolithique récent”, formerly called SOM, comprising in its final stage a few dispersed AOC burials) as a result of the merging of (1) north-western CW-associated steppe-ancestry carriers (corresponding to two of your Vlaardingen/CW individuals), (2) individuals associated with the “Néolithique récent” and (3) individuals associated with Maritime Bell Beakers originating from southwestern Europe, the latter two lacking steppe-ancestry. A discussion of our model and a citation of our article is missing in the present manuscript given the similarity of the conclusions drawn herein.

    1. On 2021-10-08 01:28:43, user Adrian Flierl ???????? wrote:

      There is no question that ANTs are essential in mitigating environmental and cellular stress.<br /> Regarding the hypothesis of functional ANT at the epithelium cell membranes, these extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. <br /> In general, there are several technical and methodological points of concerns:<br /> Overexpression of ANT (mitochondrial ANT content is tightly regulated) can lead to miss-targeting, sorting or even excretion from cells, especially in cells with a high secretory capacity. It also has been shown that a significant portion of mitochondrial proteins are excreted through vesicles and Exosomes. <br /> Technically, there is the possibility of imaging immuno-histo/cyto-chemistry artifacts due to unspecific binding of primary and secondary antibodies (entrapment), when employing fluorescence-immunocytochemistry in this notoriously difficult cell type.<br /> It would have been nice to have additional evidence for ANT localization to the cell membranes, either by immunohisto/cyto staining controls, a secondary detection method (higher mag or EM) or simple biophysical cellular fractionation (lipid fraction) and protein detection (western).

      As much as I'd like to see ANT to also fulfill a role of regulating airway epithelial cell membrane function, I would have to see additional evidence that would support the significant functional presence of ANTs at cytoplasmic membranes.

    1. On 2019-11-13 11:38:26, user Aaqib Sohail wrote:

      Dear Travaglini,<br /> Thank you for sharing the article, very comprehensive study. Really liked it.<br /> I was trying to access the script from github, but the link is not work. Can you check if it is valid?<br /> Aaqib

    1. On 2018-03-08 17:16:32, user Dan Quang wrote:

      As one of the ENCODE-DREAM competitors you compared against, I'd like to give my two cents. First, with the exception of CTCF, your method only displays competitive performance against the other models when you trained on CISTROME data. CISTROME data was not allowed in the challenge. Second, you used PhastCons conservation data. Conservation data was explicitly forbidden in the challenge.

      Anyways, I wish you the best of luck in the review process! Given my luck, you will likely get published well before my manuscript ever gets accepted anywhere!

    1. On 2021-05-06 14:00:58, user Artem Barski wrote:

      Given the quick developments in this area, this robust comparison of various WfMS will be very useful for the field.<br /> I noticed that in your discussion of CWL, you mostly used the reference implementation (cwl-tool), rather than a number of excellent pipeline managers that were developed for CWL. The reference implementation is just that- a reference for the language. The key “workflow manager” features are coming from WfMSs, such as CWL-Airflow, Toil and others. For this reason, the discussion of WfMS features, such as resources, data staging, parallelization, retries, etc. is centered on WDL/Cromwell and Nextflow but is missing CWL WfMS, making the comparison incomplete. Even for the test case, Cromwell (originally a WDL WfMS) is used as a CWL WfMS. I believe, adding a discussion and testing CWL runners will greatly enhance the paper.<br /> Separately, I noticed that our CWL pipeline manager, CWL-Airflow is mentioned in one of your tables as tedious to setup. While we provide a simple pip install option for CWL-Airflow, we would very much appreciate feedback on what caused difficulties in setting it up. We would also be happy to help you troubleshoot the setup if this will be helpful.

    1. On 2016-05-09 12:42:23, user Dirk Jochmans wrote:

      Favipiravir resistance (minor) has already been described for CHIKV. So possibly needed to adapt the text.<br /> Mutations in the chikungunya virus non-structural proteins cause resistance to favipiravir (T-705), a broad-spectrum antiviral.<br /> Delang L et al<br /> Antimicrob Chemother. 2014 Oct;69(10):2770-84. doi: 10.1093/jac/dku209. Epub 2014 Jun 20

    1. On 2021-01-27 20:35:37, user Rath R. Weird wrote:

      A few simple takeaways from this work:<br /> 1) structural biologists unconcerned with functional (e.g. biochemical) analysis of their samples are liable to determining the structure of catalytically dead enzymes;<br /> 2) there is such thing as over-optimization of expression vector;<br /> 3) soluble protein isn't necessarily the native one (just like non-denaturing doesn't always mean native, as in purification);<br /> 4) it naturally follows from the differential impact of synonymic codons on folding and activity of SARS-CoV-2/hCoV-19 RdRp in one heterologous host (E. coli) that they'd have similar (in magnitude) impact on its expression in another heterologous host (human). Which calls for as careful examination of SARS-CoV-2/hCoV-19 mutations in terms of codon replacement, as received by amino acid substitutions. Furthermore, the non-synonymic mutations may impact fitness not only through the impact of amino acid change, but the codon frequency alteration also.

    1. On 2020-09-27 04:32:46, user John Philip Vaughen wrote:

      Excited to see this mechanism for non-autonomous GBA action and aggregate spread! Sharing a concern I've seen using multiple independent UAS-Gba1b transgenes (including those in attp2/attp40): GAL4-independent rescue of Gba-null fly phenotypes when UAS-Gba1b is present. Your FigS1 is reassuring, so I was wondering what temperature you do rescues at, and if you've noticed GAL4-independent rescue in other experiments? We think the fly brain is especially sensitive to GAL4-independent leak from UAS-GBA1b constructs, which makes cell-type specific rescue challenging (but is in line with human sensitivity to Enzyme Replacement Therapy)

    1. On 2016-07-20 17:13:25, user Atanas Kumbarov wrote:

      I want to join the ones complaining about the Y-DNA haplogroup assignments. This happens with every single ancient DNA publication - haplogroup assignments are extremely conservative and often completely wrong. For example, the haplogroup diagram on Fu et. al. (2016) was completely messed up.

      I just came back from vacation an it took me just four or five hours to download the data for this study, process it and get haplogroup assignments which go much deeper than original ones. If I had a better PC and faster downlink, it could be done twice as fast.

      I wonder how people who spend their entire time on this and make a living out of this fail to assign haplogroups more accurately.

    1. On 2016-08-03 02:17:30, user Charles Simmins wrote:

      Chikungunya reached levels approaching 38% of the population on Reunion. When it moved into the Caribbean, Martinique and Guadeloupe reached reported levels over 15% in the first wave. These numbers are much lower.

      There is data on microcephaly related to an infection from Brazil. In the first 1,500 reports, a study found 652 confirmed newborns with this defect. [ http://www.thelancet.com/jo... ] As of the latest report from the Ministry, through July 23, a maximum of 1,749 reports were confirmed to be microcephaly related to an infection. It appears, in Brazil, that your first column in Figure S7 is closest to the real world data. In fact, that estimate clearly is in excess of that reported as your estimate is of first trimester infections alone. The real world data is for all trimesters.

      The estimates of asymptomatic Zika viral illnesses are based on the Yap Island studies. I have been able to locate data on over 14,000 individuals tested. 28.5% of the 883 positives were asymptomatic. [ http://northshorejournal.or... ]

      I apologize for that not being in a paper. All three sources are linked in the article. I believe this data, with far more actual tested patients, is strongly suggestive that the Yap studies have overestimated the number of sub-clinical, asymptomatic Zika infections.

    1. On 2025-08-05 13:29:54, user Prof. T. K. Wood wrote:

      Please see two other 'rare' prophage-driven 'complex and fundamental' effects of phage on metabolism:

      1. doi:10.1111/1462-2920.15816 for prophage control of host resuscitation from the persister state

      and

      1. doi: 10.1128/spectrum.03471-23 for a prophage protein increasing survival in bile.
    1. On 2017-04-17 17:17:21, user Chris Kennedy wrote:

      Looks like the abstract in the paper does not match the one posted here on biorxiv: the web abstract refers to "the latest Rosetta energy function, Aasgard2017" but when I download the PDF it says (p. 2): " the latest Rosetta energy function, beta_nov15".

    1. On 2024-10-28 09:39:36, user Isabella Capellini wrote:

      A revised version of this manuscript is now available in Proceedings B:<br /> Mortlock E, Silovský V, Güldenpfennig J, Faltusová M, Olejarz A, Börger L, Ježek M, Jennings DJ, Capellini I. 2024 Sleep in the wild: the importance of individual effects and environmental conditions<br /> on sleep behaviour in wild boar. Proc. R. Soc. B 291: 20232115.<br /> https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2023.2115

    1. On 2020-09-13 09:19:36, user Matt wrote:

      Authors, do you find there any relationship between the intensity of founder effects within groups as measured by the ASCEND If%, to either elevated Fst (relative to closely related populations), or to reduced conditional heterozygosity? It would seem like there ought to be. If not, is there anything which you believe could explain this?

    1. On 2016-09-16 20:14:20, user cpotter wrote:

      Nice work! We just had a paper published online at G3 regarding dominant maternal effects caused by genomically integrated CRISPR/Cas9 components in Drosophila (Sept 16 2016). Our work also touches on important implications for CRISPR/Cas9 mediated gene-drive mechanisms in insects. It suggests resistance would accumulate rapidly in wild populations when gene drive components pass through females. It would be interesting to also consider including this dominant maternal effect into your models. http://g3journal.org/conten...

    1. On 2016-09-10 16:43:44, user gwern wrote:

      If anyone was curious what the overall grand mean SNP heritability was, which doesn't seem to be mentioned in the paper, using supplementary 'All Tables', worksheet 3 'Supp Table 1', and a quick random-effects meta-analysis using 'metafor', I get 0.1559 (16%).

      (Tons of measurement error in that, though, so it's even looser a lower bound than usual. The cognitive tests alone have big test-retest error.)

    1. On 2020-05-13 16:53:24, user Anita Bandrowski wrote:

      "Hi, we're trying to improve preprints using automated screening tools. Here's some stuff that our tools found. If we're right then you might want to look at your text, but if we're not then we'd love it if you could take a moment to reply and let us know so we can improve the way our tools work. Have a nice day.

      Specifically, your paper (DOI:10.1101/2020.02.10.936898); was checked for the presence of transparency criteria such as blinding, which may not be relevant to all papers, as well as research resources such as statistical software tools, cell lines, and open data.

      We did not detect information on sex as a biological variable, which is particularly important given known sex differences in COVID-19 (Wenham et al, 2020).

      We also screened for some additional NIH & journal rigor guidelines:<br /> IACUC/IRB: not detected ; randomization of experimental groups: not detected ; reduction of experimental bias by blinding: not detected ; analysis of sample size by power calculation: not detected .

      We found that you used the following key resources: cell lines (8), software (4) . We recommend using RRIDs so that others can tell exactly what research resources you used. You can look up RRIDs at rrid.site

      We did not find a statement about open data. We also did not find a statement about open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

      More specific comments and a list of suggested RRIDs can be found by opening the Hypothes.is window on this manuscript, direct link https://hyp.is/b2aE0o-sEeqm...<br /> References cited: https://tinyurl.com/y7fpsvzy"

    1. On 2025-11-25 11:41:10, user Evolutionary Health Group wrote:

      We at the Evolutionary Health Group ( https://evoheal.github.io/) "https://evoheal.github.io/)") really enjoyed this paper. Here are our highlights:

      This study provides a clear and thoughtful evaluation of whether modern deep generative models can meaningfully improve ancestral sequence reconstruction (ASR). The authors explore a compelling idea: that variational autoencoders (VAE), trained on homologous protein families, might capture epistatic interactions that classical site-independent evolutionary models omit.<br /> A key highlight is the demonstration that VAE latent spaces do recover meaningful phylogenetic structure. The authors show that relationships among sequences are encoded coherently in the latent representation, suggesting that deep models can learn informative global organization from sequence data - an encouraging insight for future machine-learning approaches to molecular evolution.Another important contribution is the comparison across simulated evolutionary scenarios, with and without epistasis. Across all cases, classical maximum-likelihood ASR methods outperform the VAE-based approach.<br /> Finally, the study identifies the decoder as a key bottleneck, offering a constructive direction forward for the field. Even when the latent space contains strong phylogenetic signal, reconstructing accurate ancestral sequences remains challenging. The authors highlight a concrete opportunity for model development and for integrating phylogenetic constraints more explicitly into deep generative architectures.

    1. On 2020-05-12 19:57:24, user Walis Jones wrote:

      Many thanks for a very interesting paper....

      However, there is a systematic error with the analysis of the Octet biosensor data......

      The dissociation data for the sensorgrams in Figure S1 show the response increasing with time during the dissociation phase....

      This is most clearly seen in the data found in the lower right-hand panel,where a Kdiss (s-1) = 8.0 x 10-5 is reported.

      It is clear from the data that there is a positive baseline-drift occurring in all of the sensorgrams, which is contributing to around a net 10-fold increase in the association rate constant, and a further increase in the dissociation rate constant, giving the exceedingly high affinities quoted.

      I do not have the raw data at hand, nor the Octet software to conduct any further analysis.However, it is likely that these affinities are approximately 100-fold higher than what they actually are, i.e., low nanoMolar, rather than low picoMolar!

      [This appears to be quite a common feature of data presented from Octet biosensor instruments. since I have observed this in other papers that report Octet data also.]

      The data needs a blank buffer subtraction in order to compensate for the drift in baseline.....

      Another potential issue is the design of the kinetic experiment itself - there is a change that, with the relatively high on and off rates that are quoted, there could be a problem with mass transport limitations in kinetic data measurement, further complicated by the design of the Octet biosensor systems itself.

      This is important, because it masks the difference between the results of this study with data from other studies where the sensorgram data has been subject to more stringent control.

      Further, it could make other antibodies or small molecules that do have true nanoMolar affinities to be considered inferior to the antibodies described in this manuscript.

      In particular, when there is a reference to potential implications on vaccine development, there could be serious consequences when a good vaccine is developed that can provide nanoMolar antibody protection, for it to be considered to not have a sufficiently high affinity, as described in this manuscript.

      I hope that you will be able to update your data to reflect these issues, since you do have very interesting and important data to share!

    1. On 2025-03-03 14:46:23, user Elisa Rosati wrote:

      A couple of questions:<br /> 1) How can you be sure that the MAIT cells you observed are not bystander activated during the T cell stimulation and thus not really Myelin-specific? I would perhaps perform the experiments with two additional setups:<br /> a) MHC-blockage (If MAIT cells are really specific they should appear here) <br /> b) MR1-blockage (if MAIT cells are specific and activated via TCR they should not appear here)

      2) Have you tried to perform the analyses separately for HLA-DRB1*15:01 positive and negative individuals separately? It was shown by a study from Adaptive Biotechnology that a limited number of TCR clusters enriched in MS exist and that these clusters are mostly CD4 and very different in DRB1*15:01 positive and negative individuals.

    1. On 2020-04-26 17:44:04, user Sinai Immunol Review Project wrote:

      Main findings:<br /> To elucidate mechanisms of viral replication within human hosts, the authors used computational approaches to analyze the structural properties of SARS-CoV-2 RNA and predict human proteins that bind to it. They compared 2800 coronaviruses and 62 SARS-CoV-2 strains using CROSS (Computational Recognition of Secondary Structure) and CROSSalign algorithms, which predict RNA structure using sequence information and evaluate structural conservation, respectively. From these structural comparisons, they found that the spike S protein that interacts with the human receptor angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) is highly conserved amongst coronaviruses.

      The study also identified over 100,000 human protein interactions with SARS-CoV-2 utilizing catRAPID, an algorithm that determines binding potentials of proteins for RNA using secondary structure, van der Waals, and hydrogen bonding contributions. They found that the 5’ of SARS-CoV-2 is highly structured and has a strong propensity to bind to human proteins with known involvement in viral RNA processing. Amongst the proteins they identified can bind to 5’, there was significant enrichment in proteins associated with HIV infection and replication, including ATP-dependent RNA Helicase (DDX1), A-kinase anchor protein 8-like (AKAP8L), and dsRNA-specific Editase 1 (ADARB1). ?

      Limitations:<br /> The study was based off of computational structural predictions and subsequent gene ontology enrichment analyses. Computational predictions are less accurate than experimental observations, and while their predicted binding partners prompt interesting hypotheses, they must be experimentally confirmed. Furthermore, the gene ontology annotations used to create their candidate list are based off prior studies and inherently miss novel biological implications. Targeted biochemical and structural studies that can be built off their identified targets will be essential for elucidating viral-host complexes and informing potential targeted drug designs.

      Significance:<br /> Their computational approach demonstrated findings confirmatory of other studies in many respects. Their structural analysis findings of the high conservation of the spike S protein amongst analyzed coronaviruses and SARS-CoV-2 strains suggest that the spike S evolved to specifically interact with host ACE2, supporting that the human engineering of SARS-CoV2 is very unlikely and implicating spike S as a potential therapeutic target. Their RNA-protein interaction predictions suggest several relevant host-virus interactions that warrant further investigation. If proved experimentally, their identified links to proteins studied in the context of HIV and other viruses may be relevant for the repurposing of existing antiviral drugs for SARS-CoV-2.

      Review by Michelle Tran as part of a project by students, postdocs, and faculty at the Immunology Institute of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

    1. On 2019-10-22 23:42:51, user P. N. wrote:

      In this paper, the authors challenge the conventional mechanistic dogma of epithelial cell adherens junctions (referred to in the paper as the zonula adherens or ZA) being primarily anchored/regulated by E-cadherin. They make this argument primarily through various immunostaining assays of in-vitro Epithelial Caco-2 cell lines and human “in-vivo” intestinal biopsies followed by super-resolution microscopy. Using these assays, the authors provide evidence for a much closer co-localization of the proteins Nectin, Afadin, and the Nectin-Afadin complex, rather than E-cadherin, to the actin-belt complex on the apical side of the cells. The authors notice that these co-localizations are not seen in previous studies of epithelial cells, and hypothesize that this may be due to the lower spatial resolution of microscopy technology during the time of previous publications, and/or the difference in the maturation levels of the cells at the time they were studied. To study this observation further, the authors seeded a clone of Caco-2 (epithelial colorectal adenocarcinomal cell line) cells and allowed them to grow to, and beyond, confluency at multiple time points. They then immunostained for E-cadherin, Afadin, and Phalloidin (for actin) and studied the protein co-localization again between the different time-points. They notice that the staining overlap of E-cadherin and Afadin segregate further in the cells grown beyond confluency than in cells grown only to confluency and use this data to make the claim that the “nectin-afadin complex could be better suited to link the actin belts of neighboring cells than the E-cad-catenin complex”. Lastly, the authors use STED (Stimulated emission depletion) microscopy to visualize junctions of these same cells from a planar view, in order to better view Afadin and actin filaments in close proximity at the junctions between cultured epithelial cells. After noticing close co-localization, they summarize their argument by stating that their data suggest that “afadins together with nectins link neighboring cells actin belts using F-actin connectors.”

      Major comments

      My main concern with this paper is the generalized and sweeping claims made with lack of specific/functional evidence beyond super resolution microscopy. The title of the paper is “Nectins rather than E-cadherin anchor the actin belts at cell-cell junctions of epithelia”, which gives the reader the impression that the current ideology in the field (that E-cadherin is the main anchor for actin belts in cell-cell adhesion) will be functionally disproven. The experiments shown are only super-resolution microscopy with staining showing adjacent localization, and don’t provide enough evidence to show that 1) E-cadherin is not the main anchor, and that the Nectin-Afadin complex is the main anchor, and 2) E-cadherin does not anchor the actin belt at all. Additionally, the title makes the claim that “Nectins anchor the actin…of epithelia” which is misleading since they only make use of the intestinal epithelia models through Caco-2 (which has its own issues being an immortalized cancer cell line) and human intestinal biopsies. When the authors make comparisons of seeing differing E-cadherin ZA localization than in previous studies, and then state that the “discrepancy between our findings may stem from… the lower spatial resolution of previously used techniques or the maturation of the cells”. This is missing another important aspect of the previous studies, which is that they studied different epithelial cell types (referencing papers 10, 11, and 23 in the bibliography, which studied rat brain tissue, EL cells, and Rat1 cells respectively). To fix this issue, the authors should change the title to “Nectins anchor…intestinal epithelia“. They claim to study enterocytes in villi “for simplicity” but make bold claims in extrapolating these results as widespread in epithelia. While I do agree with microscopy technology improving drastically since the time of some of the previous referenced studies, I am not convinced of the author’s arguments given the data provided. Here are some other major changes to the paper I would have liked to see:<br /> 1) The authors make big claims such as “The adhesive complex transmitting force between actin… …has to align with these belts, because of mechanical balance”. And “Therefore our results suggest that nectin-afadin complex is responsible for tension transmission at the ZA rather than the E-cad-catenin complex.” The authors must back claims up experimentally beyond simple localization of E-cad being ~100nm away (this evidence is suggestive, but not sufficient to explain tension transmission), and expand on what they mean by “mechanical balance”.<br /> 2) Since the author’s claim is attempting to upend the current dominant ideology of E-cadherin in cell-cell adhesion and actin “anchoring”, they must provide more evidence that Nectin complexes bind more tightly/prevalently/efficiently to actin than E-cadherin. (For example the authors suggest that “the nectin-afadin complex could be better suited to link the actin belts of neighboring cells than the E-cad-catenin complex”). This could perhaps be done with a Co-immunoprecipitation assay for binding, and/or with a knockdown/knockout assay (say, with siRNA, or CRISPR, or a small molecule inhibitor) of E-cadherin-complex vs Nectin/Afadin to show the different resultant tension/adhesion effects.<br /> 3) Show a 3 color antibody stain in the last figure (planar view) for Afadin/Nectin, E-cadherin complex, and Phalloidin to definitively show better localization of Afadin-Actin than E-cadherin-Actin in the ZA and tight junctions. Another stain could be Afadin/Nectin, E-cadherin, and ZO-1 triple stain in this same planar view to verify the protein localization of the tight junctions from a different perspective.<br /> 4) Show statistical tests performed on all quantified data in all figures.

      Minor Comments

      • Biopsies removed from human intestines and studied outside of the original environment should be described as ex-vivo and not in-vivo.<br /> • In Figure 1, the cartoon showing the area of the cell being stained and the area of biopsy taken should be labelled better so as to explain exactly what is being studied (it is labelled better in the supplemental, perhaps move that cartoon to the main text)

      Overall, I think that this paper has some very interesting, but preliminary, results which need to be followed up on to make the kinds of claims that the authors make. Either more experiments need to be performed, or the language of the scope of the arguments being made must be toned down or specified to the exact context being studied, without trying to extrapolate too far beyond its own scope (e.g. generalizing epithelia, or challenging mechanistic functions of proteins without testing for actual mechanisms).

    1. On 2020-12-31 12:03:40, user Divon Lan wrote:

      What an excellent paper! This is really state of the art in genomic compression. Also, thanks for pointing out the files that were rejected by Genozip: I fixed these issues (they were mostly due to the number of INFO subfields exceeding Genozip's limit) and also corrected the issue that caused the low compression ratio on AT. All files should compress now.

      I have packaged these fixes as Genozip 10.0 and pushed it to https://github.com/divonlan... and Conda.

      Other comments related to Genozip usage:<br /> 1. I would advise to use --gtshark only for files where samples have no other subfields but GT - in other cases --gtshark's contribution to the compression ratio is expected to be minor while its performance penalty is significant. <br /> 2. It would be nice to see a benchmark on a more realistic compute environment, eg 32 or 64 cores, without limiting threads. On Genozip's side, it is designed with an explicit objective of core-scalability and has been tested to scale up to 128 cores. I am very curious to see how VCFShark compares.

      There's nothing like some friendly competition to advance science :) Well done!

    1. On 2020-05-14 16:43:23, user Kifayat Hussain wrote:

      Please let me know to which protein the nab binds , make sure it doesn't bind to spike protein that will have specifity for ace2 receptor as wel thus destruction of ace2 bearing cells in humans

    1. On 2023-08-25 18:07:39, user Felippe Truglio Machado wrote:

      This review resulted from the graduate-level course "How to Read and Evaluate Scientific Papers and Preprints" from the University of São Paulo, which aimed to provide students with the opportunity to review scientific articles, develop critical and constructive discussions on the endless frontiers of knowledge, and understand the peer review process. We are Felippe Truglio Machado and Rebeca Bueno-Alves, PhD students at the Department of Biochemistry at University of São Paulo.<br /> This article does a really good job demonstrating how mitochondrial hydrogen peroxide affects genomic DNA, with a clear and concise methodology. It puts a perspective on how we should address our concepts when we say how mitochondria oxidant production contributes toward nuclear damage, specifying if it’s a direct or indirect one, something that hasn’t been demonstrated yet. The article aimed to analyze whether hydrogen peroxide produced in mitochondria could potentially contribute directly toward nuclear DNA damage, considering the distance this species would have to travel within the cell. A highly interesting methodology for control induced hydrogen peroxide was developed based on the expression of the enzyme D-Amino Acid Oxidase (DAAO) at different sites within human cells. DAAO was anchored to the outer membrane of the mitochondria or to the nucleosomes. This method proved to be quite promising, particularly regarding its use in studies requiring more continuous or compartmentalized exposure to H2O2, as this could better mimic the physiological cell hydrogen peroxide production, instead of an exogenous burst treatment. This approach is useful for a handful of studies, especially for those focused on mitochondrial DNA integrity. <br /> Based on the presented results, the researchers were able to conclude that peroxide formed in mitochondria cannot significantly affect nuclear DNA directly, but they do not rule out the possibility of some indirect impact, warranting further studies in this regard. Although this work really is a great contribution to our current knowledge into mechanisms of oxidative nuclear damage, especially regarding the possibility of its use in future studies, it could really benefit from a different approach in some of its statements.

      Major comments:<br /> ? The discussion but not in the introduction discuss oxidative DNA lesions and repair by the BER pathway. In the topic “mitochondrial H2O2 release does not induce genomic DNA damage” represented by figure 3, it would be great to assess speciafically BER proteins, which are essential for oxidized base repair. Two additional scenarios must be considered in this situation: one in which the BER pathway is synchronized and single strand breaks are being repaired by POLB as soon as they are generated by glycosylases/ape1, therefore, without much of an increase in single strand breaks. The other one in which the repair proteins are oxidized and repair is not initiated, therefore mutagenic lesions such as 8-oxoG would not impair DNA replication, not inducing cell cycle arrest, which would lead to infidelity of DNA replication instead. So, experiments focused on the BER pathway would help to substantiate the results. Suggestions include measuring OGG1, APE1, or PolB, adding them to the western blot data, or even “BER signaling proteins” such as PARP1. With the present data, we know that peroxide production from the nucleus and mitochondria can cause or not cause nuclear DNA damage (DNA strand breaks), but the mutation rate caused by these types of damage and/or by the mutagenic lesions is not determined. In sync with this line of thought, it would also be interesting to detect damage and survival in the cells after a few days to see how the possible mutations could be established and impact on cell physiology. <br /> ? It would be important to have results that can characterize the experimental model established by the group. In the first figure, they show through the measurement of oxygen consumption that the model was effective in generating H2O2 after the addition of D-Alanine, both in the lineage expressing DAAO in the nucleosomes and in the outer mitochondrial membrane. In order to ascertain whether the addition of the DAAO enzyme with or without D-Ala, by itself, could generate an impact on mitochondrial function or non-mitochondrial oxygen consumption, a comprehensive bioenergetic characterization of the model as a whole would be really beneficial This would ensure that the observed changes are attributable to the specific impact of DAAO and not something indirect through changes in oxidative phosphorylation.<br /> ? The paper could be really improved by adding an assessment of mitochondrial DNA. First, it’s important to differentiate the two genomes. Only nuclear DNA damage was measured, so when DNA damage is mentioned it is important to address this limitation. Second, despite having far less coding genes compared to nuclear DNA, mtDNA oxidative damage and mutation should not be excluded from the discussion. Although mt H2O2 could not contribute directly toward tumorigenesis in the nucleus as stated, it could cause mutations in mtDNA, and this could also have detrimental consequences that should be worth mentioning in the discussion. Also, since the model is already available, future studies analyzing controlled mtDNA damage and mutations caused by peroxide would be a great contribution, since mitochondrial dysfunction caused by impaired mitochondrially-encoded protein synthesis has a big impact in a plethora of disorders. The nuclear genome is of course the main character in cancer, but mtDNA should not be excluded regarding its importance in cell metabolism. Experiments such as detecting mtDNA copy number by PCR and measuring oxygen consumption using different mt complex inhibitors would add a lot to this work, and would provide an overview of H2O2 production by D-Amino Acid Oxidase DAAO impact on mitochondria. In the absence of this data, it's challenging to determine whether any alterations are due to impacts on nuclear or mitochondrial DNA.<br /> ? Regarding the cell survival data, a clonogenic assay and a MTT assay could yield interesting insights and complement the crystal violet data presented in Figure 2. The methods used in the article assessed the effect of H2O2 after 24 hours of treatment, but it would be worthwhile to observe their impact over longer periods. Therefore, a clonogenic assay would be quite valuable to reinforce the data and allow for more comprehensive conclusions, and it also would enable to assess cell survival in a quantitative way. The MTT assay could complement this data since it can be used to analyze cell viability in a mitochondrial metabolism dependent way.<br /> ? Regarding cell death induced by ferroptosis, it would be good if mitochondria-mediated cell death (citC/Caspase9) could be measured, and also mitophagy. Since a lot of damage is being generated in mitochondria it would be interesting to see its impact on other cell death mechanisms and mitochondrial degradation.

      ? Some minor statements: <br /> ? Figure 3A could be quantified and presented in graphs for better data visualization <br /> ? In figure 4, the treatment time scale could be aligned to the left like the other figures instead of in the middle.

    1. On 2019-06-07 14:24:07, user Olivier Gandrillon wrote:

      Dear authors

      We read with interest your BioRxiv preprint and would like to communicate the following comments:

      1. We find that in general, you tend to make very strong statements that tend to contradict the existing litterature. For example, the bursting model you derive is exactly the one that is tacitly considered in many existing biology papers. It is interesting to state it more explicitly than usually done in biological communities, but still, the very same bursting model was considered in [Shahrezaei & Swain, 2008] and the negative binomial distribution was also derived in that paper.

      2. As you note in your preprint, the negative binomial distribution is nothing but an alternative parameterization of the Poisson-gamma distribution, which itself is a rigorous first order approximation of the Poisson-beta distribution derived from the mechanistic two-state promoter model. This approximation corresponds to the so-called bursty regime, which is biologically relevant and well accepted.

      3. Also, the Poisson layer becomes negligible when mRNA quantities span a high range, which happens in practice (e.g., figure 5.A of [Albayrak et al., 2016]). The counterpart of your bursting model is then a piecewise-deterministic Markov process that is well-established [Friedman et al., 2006]. Related to that, you really should check and cite existing literature, for example about rigorous convergence results [Crudu et al., 2012] or the application to single-cell expression data [Herbach et al., 2017].

      Ulysse Herbach, Olivier Gandrillon

      Refs:

      [Shahrezaei & Swain, Analytical distributions for stochastic gene expression, PNAS 2008]

      [Albayrak et al., Digital Quantification of Proteins and mRNA in Single Mammalian Cells, Molecular Cell 2016]

      [Friedman et al., Linking stochastic dynamics to population distribution: an analytical framework of gene expression, Phys Rev Lett 2006]

      [Crudu et al., Convergence of stochastic gene networks to hybrid piecewise deterministic processes, The Annals of Applied Probability 2012]

      [Herbach et al., Inferring gene regulatory networks from single-cell data: a mechanistic approach, BMC Systems Biology 2017]

    1. On 2015-03-27 22:32:54, user Fabien Campagne wrote:

      What is the impact of sequencing errors on the ability to identify matches? It seems to me that the approach as described here does not tolerate any mismatches in the k-mers. While mismatch tolerance can be added in various ways (post-filtering, multi-queries to account for all possible mismatches, or reducing the proportion of k-mers that must match along the query), such changes will certainly impact the performance of the method. This is important because the approaches used as baseline in the benchmark both are able to tolerate differences between the query and the sequenced in the index. When this ability is built on top of SBT, I wonder how seriously will the performance advantage reduced?

    1. On 2020-05-26 17:14:03, user Sinai Immunol Review Project wrote:

      The main finding of the article: <br /> The pathophysiology of severe pneumonia and acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)-induced is related with an overproduction of early response proinflammatory cytokines, leading to an increased vascular permeability and high risk of death. Chest radiation therapy using low doses (<1 Gy) was beneficial in the past to treat pneumonia, exerting anti-inflammatory effects in the lung, however, the involved mechanism remained uncertain. The authors proposed that macrophages could be involved in the counteracting lung inflammation after irradiation, and investigated this through in vitro studies with human and mouse lung macrophages, and in vivo pneumonia models in mice. <br /> Normal human lung cells were collected from 3 donors (n=2 to lung cancer, n=1 to benign disease). From these cells, macrophages were isolated and stimulated for 6 hours with Poly(I:C) (1ug/mL) and were irradiated using 0.5 or 1 Gy doses, or non-irradiated. In relation to the murine model, C57BL/6 mice received intratracheally two doses (100ug and 50ug – two consecutive days) of lipopolysaccharide (LPS) or toll-like receptor 3 ligand Poly(I:C). Six hours after the second intranasal dose, 0.5 or 1 Gy of irradiation was applied to the animal thorax. After this procedure, spectral computed tomography (CT) of the mice chest at different time points was performed. Flow cytometry was performed for human lung macrophages and for mouse lung cells. Cytokines concentrations in culture supernatants from in vitro experiments were profiled. <br /> The quantification of supernatants demonstrated that both doses of irradiation, 0.5 and 1Gy, significantly decreased IFNy and increased IL-10 secretion in human lung macrophages stimulated with Poly(I:C) in comparison to non-irradiated Poly (I:C)-stimulated cells. The flow cytometry analysis showed higher percentage of human lung macrophages producing IL-10 after 0.5 Gy irradiation dose when compared with the other conditions, and decrease IL-6 production after both doses of irradiation in comparison to non-irradiation cells. In the in vivo pneumonia mouse model, the authors showed that low dose thorax irradiation of mice treated with LPS or Poly(I:C), resulted in increased IL-10 production by a distinct group of macrophages dubbed nerve- and airway-associated macrophages (NAMs) compared to non-irradiated mice. In addition, the lung CT scans revealed that lungs irradiated at 1Gy presented less tissue density, indicating lower pulmonary inflammatory process in the lung.

      Critical analysis of the study: <br /> The data presented in this manuscript is quite limited, its mostly restricted to production of IL-10, IFN-g and IL-6 (one experiment) by lung macrophages without any other functional analysis. The only data on lung inflammation are the CT scans, adding tissue histology would have improved the analysis. The description of experimental details is incomplete, and the number of human tissues analyzed in the in vitro culture is very small. Given its potential importance in the mechanisms of SARS-CoV-2 lung pathology, the role of alveolar macrophages and interstitial macrophages could have been explored in more depth. The authors could had analyzed others pro- and anti-inflammatory markers, like TNFa, IL-1b, IL-1Ra, IL-8, as well as mediators involved in lung inflammation resolution such as VEGF-A. The manuscript has a comprehensive discussion on the effects of chest irradiation on lung inflammation.

      The importance and implications for the current epidemics: <br /> Research indicates that “cytokine storm”, an uncontrolled over-production of inflammatory markers which, in turn, sustain a systemic inflammatory response, is mostly responsible for the occurrence of severe acute respiratory syndrome. This manuscript shows that low dose thorax radiation is able to direct the pro-inflammatory lung cell responses into an anti-inflammatory response. Therefore, this therapy could be useful to mitigate lung inflammatory process in Covid-19. A point to highlight is that side and adverse effects must be well evaluated before a possible irradiation treatment in an infectious condition such as COVID-19.

      Reviewed by Bruna Gazzi de Lima Seolin.

    1. On 2025-10-04 14:48:07, user CDSL JHSPH wrote:

      Dear Dr. Clare et. al,

      This article proved to be an amazing opportunity to be able to review your research.

      I found this research paper to be interesting because a lot of previous research before has not discussed how DNA from terrestrial animals can be found in the air and this information could help with biomonitoring similar to how eDNA is utilized in aquatic settings.

      I understand that this type of research has never been done before and it demonstrated how this technology can detect species in zoos and demonstrates how it can serve to be useful in the biodiversity field.

      I do wonder since there are high levels of contamination within these air samples how reliable could the samples be? I also understand that the method of sampling each information costs a lot and I wonder how this could be accessible to various laboratories dedicated to protecting biodiversity? I’m curious to know if you were able to develop further tools to mitigate the effects of contamination within the data samples collected.

      I thought it was incredible that in a zoo setting the biodiversity monitoring was able to identify specific species and the location of those species. Another question I have with this information is if you have given thought if the information could have been different if the tool was placed in a wild life setting instead of a controlled environment such as the zoo?

      Overall, I think this paper and the research done with various methods will help with further research as to how DNA from the air can be utilized to revolutionize biodiversity further in the future.

      Thank you for presenting this research.

    1. On 2022-11-13 15:18:53, user Hong wrote:

      Thanks for the interesting paper. RE contact head fitting, given that L*K is ~100s, I'm wondering whether the training size 20 is too small and the deviation 0.0028 is due to overfitting? Also in github it seam the head is co-trained within the NN, rather than separately trained using sklearn?

    1. On 2018-05-01 11:36:49, user Ross Mounce wrote:

      "Scripts are also available on github (respository name: Cooperate-and-Radiate)"

      Why not just give the URL to the repository? In any case I could not find any public repository on github with that name.

    1. On 2015-03-20 09:36:06, user Jomar Fajardo Rabajante wrote:

      Note: the statement "There are no deep valleys only continuous zigzag canals" is for Fig. 5a and Fig. 5b. <br /> In Fig. 5a, X_1, X_2, X_3, X_4 are initially silenced, and X_5 is initially active.<br /> In Fig. 5b, X_1, X_2, X_3 are initially silenced, and X_4 is initially active.

    1. On 2018-10-10 09:29:32, user James Bonfield wrote:

      Thank you for the updates with more referencing to existing state of the art tools and some comparisons. However I feel the language is confusing in places. In the "compression capabilities" section there are a lot of "could" and no actual "does". It needs to be clearer how much of this is real (and if so please give MPEG-G numbers) and how much is planned for the future. Science thrives on evidence and data, not on "senses" and feelings.

      You provide numbers for aligned data in SAM, BAM, CRAM and Deez, but do not state the data set. You mention in a footnote that all numbers come from the corresponding publication did not not state which. For other readers, I discovered them here: https://www.nature.com/arti... (if you cannot read that, the DeeZ paper supplementary text is public I think).

      This (Deez) is an old paper so comparing earlier versions of the file formats (CRAM v2), but fortunately it is well written and includes references to the data sets in question. You would be best served doing a fair comparison to the current versions of these tools and explicitly citing the data set here, along with some candidate MPEG-G figures. I accept the compression ratio may improve, but we need to at least see how it performs right now.

      The large human genome file used in DeeZ paper is ftp://ftp.sra.ebi.ac.uk/vol....

      CRAM v3 (the current standard) with default parameters shrinks this file to 64.2 GiB while CRAM v3 with larger slice sizes (but still 1/10th the size that DeeZ uses) and enabling bzip2 and lzma modes shrinks it to 56.1GiB (command line: scramble -7jZ -s 100000). The proposed codecs in CRAM 4 are around 53.1GiB (although the slower mode is still running). These compare very well to the quoted (CRAM 2) size of 75 GiB.

      In summary, once again this paper fails to use modern versions of software to compare against; although we're now only 4 years out of date instead of 10 so it's going in the right direction.

      Finally you imply that MPEG-G could be comparable to (a 4 year old) DeeZ, in which case I have to conclude it is already larger than existing formats. If this is not true, *please* give us some hard data to go on. I can't believe this will actually be true, but I am starting to suspect this format hasn't actually been implemented yet given the reluctance to show the performance anywhere.

      Without actual data I am afraid this preprint is little more than an advertisement for something yet to arrive.

    1. On 2018-04-05 23:08:06, user Rachel Steele wrote:

      Review of Hannigan et al. (2018)

      Biogeography & environmental conditions shape bacteriophage-bacteria networks across the human microbiome

      Summary:

      In this paper, the authors created a network model which characterized the interactions between viruses and bacteria within the human microbiome. To do this, they used data from three previously published metagenomic datasets. Each of the three datasets contained both purified DNA viral metagenomes and bacteria-dominated whole community metagenomes, allowing the authors to link DNA virome data with the bacterial metagenome. The datasets were assembled into contigs, and the resulting contigs were clustered into either phage or bacterial operational genomic units (OGUs). The authors used a machine-learning algorithm to predict which phage OGUs would infect which bacterial OGUs. The authors used bacterial and phage species with different infection ranges and known interactions as a training data set for a machine learning algorithm, which populated a network model for the metagenomic datasets used based on the following features:

      Genome nucleotide similarities (Blast)<br /> Gene amino acid sequence similarities (BlastX)<br /> Bacterial Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat spacer sequences that target phages (CRISPR)<br /> Similarity of protein families associated with experimentally identified protein-protein interactions (Pfam)

      The authors then examined the role of diet and obesity on gut microbiome network connectivity using centrality metrics, and found that high-fat diets appeared to have a less connected network. Additionally, the obesity-associated networks appeared to possibly be less connected. The individuality of microbial networks was then investigated using a dissimilarity metric to test whether microbiome network structures were more similar within people than between people over time. It was found that network dissimilarity within each person was less than the network dissimilarity between that person and other individuals (not statistically significant). There was no evidence for gut network conservation among family members, though the skin microbiome network structure was conserved within individuals.The network was also studied across the human skin landscape, and it was found that moisture and occlusion played a significant role in the network structure of the skin microbiome.

      Major Comments:

      1. Genome nucleotide similarities and gene amino acid similarities are collinear parameters; it is unclear how each of these parameters can give unique contributions to the model.

      2. The receiver operating characteristic is very low; it is so close to 0.5 that it seems that the model practically randomly assigns network nodes and edges to bacteria and phages. Perhaps the method is not as predictive as the authors may suggest in the text.

      3. To an individual not well-versed in phage biology, it is unclear why seeing sequence elements similar to the bacterial 16S rRNA gene in the virome datasets would with certainty indicate bacterial sequence noise (lines 122-125). Is it known that phages never have sequence similarity to the bacterial 16s rRNA gene?

      4. Microbiome diversity should be considered within this analysis: it is likely that as diversity changes for viral populations as well as bacterial populations, the structure of the network will be greatly affected. Will this impact the conclusions?

      5. In lines 211-214, it is stated that a higher closeness centrality indicates more connectivity, which suggests a greater resilience against network degradation by extinction events, yet in lines 319-322, it is stated that less connected networks suggest a higher resilience against network degradation, a seeming contradiction which confuses the reader.

      6. The training data set as represented in Figure S4A is disturbingly sparse but these data are key in making predictions regarding interactions between viruses and bacteria in the gut. The choice of virus-bacteria tested should be clearly discussed and its limitations outlined.

      7. One way to test the consistency of the method used to create the model might be to randomly subset the original set of training data (from Fig S4A), and use these randomly selected interactions to create a new model (use the subset as training data), then to use the whole set of data presented in Figure S4 as experimental data to determine how well the model works for this set of known interactions. This method could be repeated to determine how consistently the networks are created - perhaps this is a “power analysis” (how many of the interactions in Fig S4A are needed to consistently predict interactions in the gut virus-bacteria community.

      8. Figure 1 has one more image than is referenced in the caption; it appears that for the provided image, Figure 1D was not described in the caption. This image should either be removed from the figure or should be incorporated into the figure caption and into the text. After making the correction, all references to Figure 1 should be checked to ensure the correct image(s) within the figure are referenced.

      9. The paper provides a balance of information which indicates how the model moves the field forward while at the same time indicating the shortcomings and weaknesses of the model. However, some biased language is included, specifically in lines 163-165. It is unknown what is meant by “ideal” for balancing true positives and true negatives within the model.

      Minor Comments:

      1. Culture-dependent data is referred to in lines 72-74 as being limited in the scale of possible experiments and analyses in contrast to using inferred data from metagenomic datasets, and in lines 360-363, it is stated that inferring specific relationships between phage and bacterial species is limited compared to culture-based work. With these different benefits and disadvantages, it is unclear whether there a balance which in the future could be found between the two methods.

      2. The figures at the end are not labeled as Figures 1-4. This can cause confusion, as the figures are included separately from their captions. To enhance readability and reduce confusion for the reader when looking through the figures, the figures should be included with their captions in line with the text within which they are referred.

      3. It is unclear why the random forest model was used to build the network. Are there other machine-learning algorithms which could be used to generate a network model? Why specifically choose this one?

      4. Line 43 contains a typo; “homestatsis” should be changed to “homeostasis”.

      5. The caption for figure 2 contains a typo: in “because one of the was only sampled post-diet”, “the” should be changed to “them”.

      6. Figure two could have a better format: Axes should be scaled the same way so comparisons between plots can be made. Degree centrality plots and closeness centrality plots could be lined up next to one another, and matching treatments/groups could be stacked vertically so that one representation of each axis could be used.

      7. It is unclear whether it is the same individual under study for the high fat vs. low fat diet or for the healthy/obese individuals -- it would be easier to understand the data if individuals were color-coded.

      8. Averages and error bars could be presented on the plots for each study group

      9. The supplemental figures and table were provided as individual files rather than being included in the text. This makes it difficult for the reader to access them.

    1. On 2023-09-30 14:04:49, user Erik Choueri wrote:

      The study seeks to address the significant question of whether rivers act as barriers to gene flow in Neotropical primates—a topic that carries substantial weight in understanding primate evolution and speciation processes in these diverse and ecologically important regions. While the overarching theme is commendable, there are certain aspects that warrant attention and further refinement: <br /> Although the purpose of the study is to test the hypothesis of rivers acting as barriers to gene flow in Neotropical primates, the introduction excessively focuses on the Amazonia. We suggest to bring the impact of rivers on primates in other Neotropical or global biomes. Additionally, the role of other physiographic barriers in primate structuring has been underexplored. Many statements lack references, some of which are fundamental to the work, such as a source showing primate distributions associated with rivers (lines 84:87) or proposing river width as a proxy for molecular dissimilarity in undersampled areas (lines 116:117). The justification for using mitochondrial DNA markers is weak and exposes limitations that are not exclusive to mtDNA. The line 140 brings confusion about the geographical scope of the study, stating that it would cover only South America and not the Neotropics. The objective 3 proposes to model geographical regions that lack additional taxonomic explorations, but no methodology is proposed for this, and the results and discussion briefly touch on such topic.<br /> Overall, there is a lack of clarity in the methodology description, and we suggest that the authors assume that the analytical details of a scientific paper should prioritize its replicability. Regarding spatial analyses, how accurate are the IUCN Red List distributions for all Platyrrhini species or to what extent were physiographic barriers used as estimates to define the boundaries of these polygons? Also, IUCN specialist maps would probably use rivers as the limit of the distribution for species species and subspecies, thus, testing rivers as barriers using this dataset could potentially be a bit circular. What criteria were used to define "mountains" (a threshold for altitude? Topographic roughness? Any reference?). In the case of Andean Mountains for example, instead of separating sister species-pairs, the separation could be older and at the genus level. It is also inappropriate to consider the width of the river at the midpoint of the species boundary, as organisms could potentially cross it at any point, especially where the river is narrower. It is also unclear how (or if) the effects of geographical distance on genetic divergence (isolation by distance) were controlled.<br /> Regarding molecular analyses, does the quantity and spatial extent of sampling adequately represent the distribution and haplotypes of species? Could taxonomic uncertainties be affecting these data? Is the locality of these sequences described as geographic coordinates or the name of the sampling site? How were the data linked to species: were DNA sequences obtained from taxonomic studies confirming identification or the authors verified the respective collected specimen? Were phylogenetic topologies and genetic distances inferred considering which nucleotide substitution models? Was any analysis of model selection per partition performed (e.g., PartitionFinder)? If not, some justification is needed for the methodology chosen.<br /> Maps of sampling points and phylogenetic trees would greatly facilitate the overall interpretation of results, mainly Figure 3. Furthermore, it is important to explicitly assume the expected topology for a scenario in which the river promoted speciation. Would it be reciprocal monophyly? Additionally, we suggest that the results of genetic dissimilarity and statistical analyses be placed in a table (lines 289 to 308). The lack of phylogenetic support listed in "Suspect taxonomy" should be interpreted with caution, as it may present analytical biases related to the use of few mitochondrial sequences considering inappropriate nucleotide substitution models.<br /> We miss the integration between the results and the literature. Much of the early discussion refers to a redundant description of results (lines 374:404), followed by information about the dispersion of Platyrrhini across rivers. We suggest that these two sections could be worked cohesively and in a complementary manner. The link between the low phylogenetic support in areas without geographical barriers and the suggestion of incorporating geographical barriers into taxonomic descriptions is not clear. The low supports "when no geographical barriers was evident" may reflect deficient haplotype sampling in these areas, since molecular sampling is generally denser near rivers than interfluves in Amazonia. Finally, a point brought up in the Abstract but missing from the discussion is that the findings of the study suggest that the formation of riverine barriers coincides with speciation events, but nowhere are the dates of river formation or species diversification mentioned. Such an interpretation should be avoided since the genetic structuring can be promoted by rivers in vicariant or secondary contact contexts.

    1. On 2024-10-03 21:49:13, user Francesco Del Carratore wrote:

      At the end of the methods section it is written 'To facilitate reproduction of these findings, all shareable data and code are available in a single structured file, with instructions and links for the non-shareable data, in S1 Data.'. This is great, but where can I find the S1 data as well as the code used for the analysis and figures (S1 code and S2 code)?

    1. On 2019-10-24 06:55:20, user Jonathan Bohlen wrote:

      Dear Morales-Polanco et al.

      I have read your preprint with great pleasure. It describes an intriguing<br /> discovery. The concept of mRNA co-localization is very interesting & this<br /> work could be instructive in documenting an important example of such behavior.

      Here are some notes that I took while reading your work & discussing<br /> with my colleagues:

      Figure 2: The smFISH image of NPC2 mRNA looks very similar<br /> to the mRNAs of glycolytic enzymes. Why is that? In your quantification it<br /> looks qualitatively different, but it looks very speckled.

      Also: With the smFISH method, are you saturating all mRNA<br /> molecules in the cell or are you only labelling a subset? Maybe you could<br /> include an oligo-dilution in the supplements to show that the speckled pattern<br /> is not due to sub-sampling.

      Figure 4:<br /> It would be very useful to have a negative control here, as<br /> in two mRNAs that do not localize to any kind of foci. As a negative control<br /> that would be more convincing than a simulation.

      Also: Why does the distribution of single mRNA molecules<br /> looks so markedly different from the MS2 mRNA localization you show in Figure 1?<br /> Is it really just a minority of mRNAs that localize to foci, but due to the<br /> clustering they are very prominent in the MS2 method?

      Figure 5:<br /> The fact that introduction of a stop codon or stem loop<br /> causes massive changes on the mRNA level casts some doubt in the result.

      A possible experiment to investigate the role of translation<br /> in the assembly of these granules could be:

      Brief treatment with either Cycloheximide or Puromycin to<br /> determine whether translation per se (Cycloheximide), or interaction of nascent<br /> chains (Puromycin) is responsible for granule assembly.

      Figure 6:<br /> The content of Panel C is unclear and the panel is not<br /> referenced in the text.

      Figure 7: <br /> Without a negative control this experiment is not<br /> conclusive.

      I wish you good luck & great success with getting this nice<br /> story published!

      Jonathan Bohlen <br /> PhD Student @ DKFZ Heidelberg

    1. On 2019-05-13 14:43:41, user Jan Janouškovec wrote:

      Hi, this looks quite useful and in line with earlier conclusion based on long Sanger-derived rDNA contigs. A couple very small suggestions about the apicomplexan part, even if this is not quite in the focus. You talk about resolving "neogregarines" as a group with the combined dataset but several papers before you have shown they are polyphyletic. Ascogregarina is not even a neogregarine and you can't really compare the poor sampling in your concatenated tree to Rueckert et al., 2011 or other publications. I'd consider avoiding the name altogether (they are all eugregarines, really). I would also not introduce gregarine as "paraphyletic" since this question is far from resolved. Of note, Simdyanov et al., 2017, Peer J, have done good work on comparing the resolution power of the 18S+28S concatenation over 18S alone in gregarines and all apicomplexans, including some <br /> relationships discussed in this paper; perhaps something to mention here too. Good luck.

    1. On 2019-02-22 09:34:35, user Justin Halls wrote:

      Roger, yes the observation was published, 'Pye, J. D. 1978 Some preliminary observations on flexible echolocation systems, PROC FOURTH INT BAT RES CONF eds Olembo, R.J., Castelino, J.B. and Mutere, F. A ., Kenya Lit. Bureau, Nairobi, 127-136'. and was also referred to in 'J. David Pye 1980 Echolocation Signals and Echoes in Air in: Busnel R-G, Fish JF(eds) Animal Sonar Systems. New York: Plenum Press, pp 309-353' (esp. pp324-325). The former contains the more detailed analysis.

    1. On 2020-06-19 08:49:48, user Dr. Sebastian Boegel wrote:

      Thank you very much for your interesting. <br /> In the abstract you wrote: "We see the role of Fluoxetine in<br /> the early treatment of SARS-CoV-2 infected patients of risk groups."<br /> However the text misses a discussion in which this statement is further described. How can your findings be translated into translation? <br /> Thank you

    1. On 2019-03-14 06:11:14, user Trudy Oliver wrote:

      Look forward to diving into this. Thanks for sharing on BioRxiv! Btw, we wish for you to refer to our mouse model (RPM) as having "over-expression of MYC" rather than "MYC amplification" to be clear that this is not genomic amplification. We should also keep in mind the mouse harbors point mutant MYC T58A that doesn't occur in human SCLC, but we do think it does a good job mimicking high levels of MYC protein.

    1. On 2020-03-16 11:50:25, user Joao Meira-Neto wrote:

      This paper proposes a set of actions using the connectivity information we have published in this large basin of Atlantic Forest impacted by many disturbances, especially by the huge environmental disaster caused by a collapsed tailing dam in Mariana in November the 5th, 2015.

    1. On 2020-02-05 17:03:05, user Elionai Moura Cordeiro wrote:

      Where is the web links to the subsequent works? Can we get access to this software or only the raw data (I was thinking that was a really great improvement to my doctoral proposal project in development of a interconnected research tool)

    1. On 2020-05-20 02:39:13, user Sinai Immunol Review Project wrote:

      Summary/Main findings: <br /> Zost et al. describe the methodology used to efficiently generate a large library of highly-functional monoclonal antibodies directed against the SARS-CoV-2 spike (S) protein. Several different approaches were used to select the antibodies characterized in this study. Briefly, plasma or serum was obtained from four patients infected with SARS-CoV-2, and ELISA binding assays were used to confirm the presence of reactive antibodies to the prefusion ectodomain of either the SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-CoV S protein. Additional screens were used to assess the presence of antibodies capable of binding to the receptor binding domain (RBD) as well as the entire N-terminal domain (NTD) of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. The highest reactivity was seen in binding assays when the antigenic targets were the SARS-CoV-2 spike S2P ectodomain or RBD. SARS-CoV-2 S-specific class-switched memory B cells were isolated from peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) via flow cytometry. The two patients whose blood was collected at later stages of convalescence displayed higher frequencies of antigen-specific memory B cells and greater levels of neutralizing antibodies. S2P ectodomain- and RBD-specific memory B cells sorted from these two patients PBMCs were pooled and cultured for one week in wells containing a feeder layer of cells expressing CD40L, IL-21, and BAFF. Approximately 50% of these cells were single-cell sequenced for antibody gene synthesis. The other half were placed in a Berkeley Lights Beacon Optofluidic instrument to further identify, select, and export antigen-reactive B cells prior to single cell antibody sequencing and cloning into immunoglobulin expression vectors. Both approaches yielded a combined total of 386 recombinant SARS-CoV-2 reactive human monoclonal antibodies. Subsequent ELISA and neutralization assays were used to separate these antibodies into five classes based on their cross-reactivity with SARS-CoV and the specific binding domains on the SARS-CoV-2 S protein. Bioinformatic analysis of the immunoglobulin sequences revealed a high degree of relatedness to the inferred unmutated ancestor immunoglobulin genes.

      Critical Analysis:<br /> This study characterizes a robust repertoire of SARS-CoV-2 spike-specific antibodies. The authors begin to shed light on the binding sites of these antibodies by describing the domains on the spike protein to which these antibodies react. However, in order to more fully capture the mechanism of neutralization for the leading therapeutic candidates, it will be important to further characterize the specific epitopes and structural binding modes. This is especially important since many of the antibodies identified in this study will not directly interfere with the RBD/ACE2 interaction and therefore likely act through another mechanism such as destabilizing the spike prefusion conformation. Another interesting observation raised in this study is that, as seen with Ebola, patients do not possess a high frequency of memory B cells expressing neutralizing antibodies until later in convalescence. However, given the small number of patients in the study, a larger sample is needed to confirm this conclusion. While this study presents a comprehensive class of candidate antibodies for therapeutic development there is still much needed data describing the protective potential of these antibodies in animal models challenged with SARS-CoV-2, as the authors assert as well. Finally, as synergy has been observed in strong B cell response for other coronaviruses and the fact that antibody cocktails are an effective treatment platform to prevent mutation escape, it would be helpful to know whether specific combinations of these monoclonal antibodies enhance neutralization and in vivo protection.

      Relevance/Implications:<br /> In conclusion, this study presents a robust analysis of the specific B cell response to SARS-CoV-2 in a small number of individuals, and describes practical techniques to isolating a large and diverse panel of human monoclonal antibodies. In addition to revealing potential therapeutic antibody candidates for COVID-19, the authors provide additional information as to the complicated and inconsistent observations of antibody cross-reactivity and cross-neutralization in the context of SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2. Information on conserved and highly potent neutralizing targets of antibody responses will be critical down the road as we evaluate the immunogenicity of vaccine candidates. Meanwhile, the information in this study can be directly applied to the therapeutic antibody pipeline for SARS-CoV-2 and the methodologies described here can be adapted for similar emerging pathogens in the future.

    1. On 2023-12-13 12:39:02, user Siegel Lab wrote:

      This preprint contains a great quantitative analysis that clearly shows a role for nuclear speckles in the regulation of gene expression. The observation that the distance of a gene from nuclear speckles correlates with the splicing efficiency of its transcripts is very interesting and fits very well with an observation we made in trypanosomes, a highly divergent eukaryote.

      Trypanosomes are unicellular parasites responsible for sleeping sickness in humans. In order to survive in the mammalian host, it is essential that they express only one of more than 2000 antigens at any one time. By frequently switching the antigen they express, they can alter their surface coat and evade the immune system – a mechanism known as antigenic variation.

      Interestingly, we found that the single actively expressed antigen gene is located in close proximity to a nuclear locus enriched in pre-mRNA splicing factors (Faria and Luzak et al., 2021, Nature Microbiology; supported by Budzak et al., 2022, Nature Communications). Inactive antigen-coding genes do not show such spatial proximity and are located further away from the processing hotspot. Similar to the findings in the preprint, which show that nuclear speckle association of genes is dynamic and changes between cell types, we find that the interaction of the antigen gene with the splicing hotspot in trypanosomes is dynamic: upon activation of another antigen gene, the interaction with the previously active antigen gene is released and then re-established with the newly activated antigen gene.

      Our hypothesis in trypanosomes is the following: The active antigen gene is strongly transcribed by RNA polymerase I, and in order to ensure efficient processing of such large amounts of antigen pre-mRNA and to avoid its premature degradation, the transcribed antigen gene is brought into close proximity to a processing hotspot that provides the machinery for RNA maturation.

      Very cool to find the common principle that RNA processing can be regulated by 3D genome folding in such divergent organisms!

    1. On 2014-04-23 23:29:49, user pietro wrote:

      Congratulations for the nice work. I might be biased as we recently finished a project that addresses similar issues from a different angle (actually, it might be nice if they were to appear at a similar time...), but it seems to me that mutational tolerance under selective conditions is a relevant issue in biochemistry and molecular evolution that benefits from studies like yours. <br /> A couple of comments now ;-)<br /> I was particularly interested by the change in tolerance you observe at different selection stringencies. However, I was wondering if it might be possible for you to test enzyme activity more accurately on some variants to prove this. Indeed, although mutation on catalytic residues might be tolerated in vivo (possibly by a binding process favoured by the very high enzyme relative to antibiotic concentration), differences in vitro could be significantly higher.<br /> Did shotgun sequencing allowed you to rebuild individual full length sequences? If so, did you look at epistatic interaction between different positions? (you hint at it at some point, but it would be a long discussion to do here, so I'll leave it for now pending interest on your side). If not, how did you go about rebuilding individual mutants?<br /> Finally, your analysis of substrate-dependent mutational tolerance is very interesting from an evolutionary and functional point of view. Besides comparing mutants with all substrate-specific mutation-tolerant positions mutated, did you try to limit comparison to those that are in closer proximity to substrate/active site (there are some useful pymol script that can help for this)? Major functional changes could be brought about by fewer mutations, and the rest be noise responsible for the general decrease in overall activity you report. Here again, testing enzymes in vitro would tell you whether activity or solubility was primarily compromised.<br /> As a very vague warning, I found the last part of conclusions slightly unfair. Partially because I work with (surprise surprise) directed evolution and hence believe that the technique itself is suited for similar experiments, although it hasn't been used much still (alas, our draft isn't quite ready yet!). But also because the functional and evolutionary results you report here are (to me) very interesting and I believe you could conclude on those directly instead than finishing on the potential of the method.

      I'm sorry for my very opinionated comment/review, I hope you can get something useful out of it. Please feel free to get in touch both if you do and do not like what I wrote!

    1. On 2021-10-13 19:32:14, user Anon Anon wrote:

      There are several things about the data presented here, along with the author’s interpretations, that are concerning and warrant close scrutiny.

      1. From the Results section, it is unclear how many loci were retained for analysis. There was, evidently, more than one dataset that was generated because the authors refer to a “main dataset” in the Methods and to more than one dataset (with differing numbers of loci) in the Results. Also, at line 215, they state “3.935 samples remained from 55 individuals”. How can a fraction of a sample remain? Is a sample an individual animal? At line 219, they state that there is a dataset with as few as 7 SNPs. This is very concerning as any analysis on a RAD dataset consisting of 7 SNPs will likely not have any power to address their research questions. It is not stated which analyses are applied to which datasets; therefore, it is not possible for the reader to decide for themselves whether their results can be trusted.

      2. There are two oddities in the PCA that need to be explained. First, the PCA is not centered on zero. Additionally, it shows that 98% of the variation in the data set is explained by the first PC; however, there is no separation of individuals into clusters along the first axis. The authors ignore both of these incredibly odd patterns and focus on the 2nd axis to explain that some population structure is revealed by the second PC. I’ve never seen a PCA with these two odd patterns in the published literature, and I don’t know how to explain it (neither do the authors, evidently, since they made no attempt to interpret what is responsible for explaining 98% of the variation in their dataset), but it reveals a serious flaw in either the dataset or methods of analysis and should have been a warning flag to the authors. No other results from this study can be trusted until the oddities of the PCA can be explained in such a way that lends confidence to the quality of the dataset itself.

      3. Much of their conclusions are based on the results of STRUCTURE, but the STRUCTURE graph is not provided within the paper (nor is the supplemental documentation provided). The authors state that the best value for K is 3. If the pattern in the STRUCTURE graph does not show three clusters that correspond to geographically sampled locations, then this would need to be explained. It would be interesting to see what the STRUCTURE plot actually looks like given that the PCA is uninterpretable (the PCA and STRUCTURE plot should show comparable patterns). In the Discussion, the authors say that the inferred best value of K doesn’t match the STRUCTURE plot, stating at line 303 “However, examining the plots suggests that samples represent a single interbreeding population”. This discrepancy would need to be explained, and their explanation of more clusters, sampling scheme, and newly colonized subpopulations (lines 304-308) are very difficult to understand.

      4. The authors cite a study by Pfau et al. (which appears to be the most relevant study of this species) and compare their findings in the following passage. However, they misinterpret the findings of Pfau et al. and apparently do not understand the data upon which Pfau et al. drew their conclusions.

      The authors state at line 272 “More recently, [Pfau et al.] observed low mitochondrial DNA variation but high microsatellite diversity within the species. They concluded that genetic drift and not gene flow has had a greater impact on configuring D. elator genetic diversity. This result is possible because mitochondrial DNA has a lower effective population size than neutral nuclear markers such as RAD loci. Genetic drift could play a role in structuring mitochondrial DNA diversity, but more time would be needed to detect reduction of diversity in the nuclear genome using older markers such as microsatellites. An insufficient number of polymorphic microsatellite loci limits genetic resolution between individuals with supposed low population-level diversity. Our results suggest that RAD loci, that have a slower rate of mutation than microsatellites, are superior when investigating populations with weak population structure.”

      The first sentence is correct. However, the second sentence was only a portion of the conclusions of Pfau et al. and unrelated to mtDNA variation because that particular conclusion was based only on the microsatellite dataset. Pfau et al. actually concluded-- using microsatellite markers--that "All methods addressing population structure indicated that the Iowa Park population was divergent from the others, with Vernon and Harrold showing a somewhat intermediate relationship but with a closer affiliation with Quanah than Iowa Park, despite their closer proximity to Iowa Park. This pattern did not conform to isolation by distance, thus genetic drift appears to have played a greater role than gene flow in establishing genetic structure."

      Given the wording in the paragraph quoted above, the authors appear to be conflating the results from the mtDNA and microsatellite markers in Pfau et al. While it is true that mtDNA has a lower effective population size than nuclear marks such as RAD loci, Pfau et. al did not use RAD loci—they used microsatellites. It is also true that “Genetic drift could play a role in structuring mitochondrial DNA diversity, but more time would be needed to detect reduction of diversity in the nuclear genome”, but Pfau et al. provided explanations for why the mtDNA diversity was so low despite relatively high microsatellite diversity—going beyond just differences in effective population size.<br /> Furthermore, Pfau et al. found that nuclear microsatellites DID reveal population structure but that mtDNA did NOT reveal population structure (because there was essentially no mtDNA diversity which could be partitioned). The authors go on to say that “insufficient number of polymorphic microsatellite loci limits genetic resolution between individuals with supposed low population-level diversity”; however, microsatellite diversity was actually relatively high. The authors go on to state that RAD loci are superior to microsatellites. This is correct, but only because RAD datasets typically contain many more loci than microsatellite datasets. Surprisingly, the authors evidently didn’t notice that the microsatellite dataset of Pfau et al. actually revealed MORE genetic structure than their own RAD dataset (the opposite of what they predicted when comparing the two markers).

      1. The authors state “Our samples were collected on opposite sides of a cline, separated by a region of inaccessible private land, so it was difficult to determine if the slight differentiation is due to that distance or if there is true population substructure and isolation from other habitat patches” (line 315). A cline is found when there is a continuous distribution, but since they also state that it is unknown if populations exist between their sampling locations, how do they know that they’ve sampled opposite ends of cline, two genetically isolated populations, or two sides of a panmictic population?

      They attempted to use historical samples to fill in this distributional gap, but doing so ignores the likelihood that allele frequencies have changed within these populations over the sampled time frame. In addition, their predictions themselves are incorrect and difficult to interpret. They say “if the contemporary east and west subpopulations were indeed distinct” (line 320), which I interpret from the context to mean that the populations are geographically isolated rather than continuous. Given this hypothesis, they predict that the geographically intermediate population “the sampling hole” would be genetically intermediate between the two ends. This is actually the opposite of what is expected from population genetic theory which predicts that isolated populations diverge randomly with respect to one another. They predict the alternative hypothesis--that the species is one population--to reveal “greater differentiation between them and our sampling hole samples”. I do not understand what this statement is attempting to describe, but this hypothesis is the one that would predict the geographically intermediate population to be genetically intermediate—but only if gene flow is restricted sufficiently to produce isolation by distance. A panmictic population would show all three locations to be genetically homogenous.

      1. The authors appear to make an attempt to discuss their findings in the context of metapopulation theory (lines 349-358), but it’s confusing because of their attempted elaboration on what constitutes metapopulation criteria. They never actually make an connection between their genetic findings and metapopulation theory, but using other sources of information, state “this connection to metapopulation theory is still tenuous”. Yet they go on to state “Should managers elect for extreme measures to manage D. elator populations, such as translocations or reintroductions, knowledge that the population is a metapopulation is critical”. It seems especially careless to state that it is critical that managers recognize the species as a metapopulation when the connection is still tenuous.

      In conclusion, the striking oddities in the PCA demand a reanalysis on the quality of the dataset itself. If the dataset is in question, the results of all other analyses cannot be trusted. Furthermore, the many instances in which the authors misinterpreted their own results and made incorrect predictions from their hypotheses, are further indications that this study needs much attention before it can be used to understand the genetic patterns of Dipodomys elator for purposes of conservation and management.

    1. On 2020-12-05 19:27:16, user Gabriela Hermitte wrote:

      I quite agree with the preceding comment of Martin Carbo. Not les than 7 articles have been published on this subject in another known invertebrate model, a crab. It is completely astonishing that have been completely ignored in this pape

    1. On 2021-05-11 11:18:41, user Richard Harland wrote:

      Thanks Biorxiv for sharing this research paper. Decentralized food-waste management systems will not only help to meet demanding landfill and carbon reduction goals by achieving the aim of zero food waste to landfill, but it will also save millions of pounds at every level of the food chain. <br /> Kudos for designing mixed-level fractional factorial analysis with 12 experimental combinations. It may generate low-cost renewable energy, create jobs, develop chemical-free fertilisers for use by farmers, and aid in the restoration of valuable nutrients to the soil.

    1. On 2021-05-24 10:18:19, user Simon Schultz wrote:

      Z. Mu, K. Nikolic and S. R. Schultz (2021). Quadratic Mutual Information estimation of mouse dLGN receptive fields reveals asymmetry between ON and OFF visual pathways. Proceedings of the 10th IEEE International Conference on Neural Engineering, in press.