Comments on RRResearch: Writing the #arseniclife paper

Ironically Science and their reviewers are likely ...

2012-01-13T13:11:05.426-08:00

Ironically Science and their reviewers are likely to ask you to do many, many controls to ensure that your negative result is correct. Unfortunately they don't appear to have done that for the original paper.

It will also be interesting to see if the original paper is retracted once your paper is published. Perhaps they'll just retract part of it, like what happened at first with the CFS baloney.

Hope to read this paper soon !

2012-01-12T01:27:09.181-08:00

Hope to read this paper soon !

These journals usually refuse to publish data oppo...

2012-01-11T22:49:11.196-08:00

These journals usually refuse to publish data opposing their own publications. Given the publicity of #arseniclife, I hope this may be the starting point for a change in policy! Good luck!

P.S. Consider making a video when you can, so many...

2012-01-11T17:33:26.168-08:00

P.S. Consider making a video when you can, so many sites these days are more inclined to share a video over an article.

Well done Rosie, nice to see this result all but p...

2012-01-11T17:11:03.932-08:00

Well done Rosie, nice to see this result all but published.

Hmmm, thanks, good to know! I think some of us use...

2012-01-11T16:59:06.083-08:00

Hmmm, thanks, good to know! I think some of us use plate readers for bacterial fitness assays... hopefully this doesn't introduce too many artefacts!

The BioScreen uses special 100-well plates, and I&...

2012-01-11T15:39:42.385-08:00

The BioScreen uses special 100-well plates, and I'm certainly going to do multiple replicates in randomized wells.

Take caution with measuring growth curves in plate...

2012-01-11T14:43:03.424-08:00

Take caution with measuring growth curves in plate-readers— they often don't shake uniformly enough to make comparisons between strains meaningful... when I was in the van oudenaarden lab most of my work boiled down to taking ODs and measuring growth rates, and we found that the results from plate readers were generally not very robust compared to doing things in small, well-aerated flasks. We found the best way to account for the issue with plate-readers (if you must) is to randomly distribute the replicates for the strains you'd like to compare in the 96-well plate (generally not 100-well as you suggest). This is similar to how spatial biases on microarrays are dealt with.