Manuscripts

The sxy manuscript has been quickly reviewed and provisionally accepted by the fine journal we sent it to. The reviewers' suggestions are simple to deal with and don't require new experiments, just a bit of new analysis and some minor improvements to the text and figures. One reviewer did suggest an RNA bandshift experiment, to test whether an unknown protein binds to the sxy mRNA secondary structure, and the editor liked this idea. But they both overlooked our compensatory mutation analysis, which unambiguously shows that two of the sxy mutations increase expression because they disrupt base pairing, not because they change the recognition sequence for a protein. We'll point this out in our response and beef up the relevant part of the Discussion so readers don't make the same mistake.

The USS manuscript is hung up (the editor tells us) because the two reviewers disagreed on whether our revisions were satisfactory and the editor doesn't know what to do about it. Although this is an on-line journal promising a fast publication schedule, the review process has been very slow - 9 weeks for the less-favourable review in the first round and 7 weeks for one of the reviews of the revised manuscript (the same reviewer?). We had similar problems with a previous submission to another journal in this family (it's BioMed Central), so I think we'll avoid them in future.