Ghostwriter

15.10.2018 Matthias Wjst

The Atlantic had an interesting article on online gig platforms where you can even buy love letters.

For just $7—$5 plus a $2 service fee charged by Fiverr—Jelena wrote a 200-word love letter for me. It was great: I told her that my fictional paramour and I had been dating for 161 days, and she added up those digits, which equal the number eight, and made a reference to how flipping an “8” on its side would lead to the infinity sign. “I wanna flip that 8 to the left and spend it with you,” she wrote.

You can buy space in a fake journal. But can you buy also research? At least there is some indication of that. Continue reading Ghostwriter →

Genetics

Purifying selection affect as much as 95% of the variants

12.10.2018 Matthias Wjst

New research shows that most genetic variants in the human genome are affected by purifying selection, so nothing “neutral”.

Pouyet, Aeschbacher et al. created a measure of genetic diversity that is only affected by selection or transmission bias. The results showed that negative selection influences as much as 85 percent of our genome, whereas transmission bias affects a majority of the rest of the genome. After removing these two biases, less than 5 percent of the human genome is found to evolve by chance. This suggests that while most of our genetic material is formed of non-functional sequences, the vast majority of it evolves indirectly under some type of selection.

Software

Universitäten in Zeiten alternativer Fakten

12.10.2018 Matthias Wjst

Es ist noch Hoffnung´, solange es noch Advokaten wie Björn Brems gibt. Lesenswert das Laborjournal 10/2018, S. 24

Wird ein Maß zum Ziel, ist es kein gutes Maß mehr. Für den Neoliberalismus ist der Wettbewerb das Maß aller Dinge: Gesellschaftliche Bereiche, die bisher ohne Wettbewerb auskamen, wurden mit Wettbewerbsmerkmalen versehen – mit der Absicht, Effizienz zu steigern und Kosten zu senken. Mit dem Zusammenbruch des Ostblocks kollabierte der politische Widerstand gegen diese gefährliche Ideologie schließlich auch westlich der Mauer. Seit nunmehr fast dreißig Jahren – einer ganzen Generation – hat sich dieses Geschwür durch die westlichen Demokratien gefressen.

Allergy

Does Acinetobacter lwoffii F78 protect from allergy?

10.10.2018 Matthias Wjst

When reading a new Science immunology paper (“Inception of early-life allergen-induced airway hyperresponsiveness is reliant on IL-13+CD4+T cells“) one could again think that A. lwoffii could protect from the development of house mite allergy.

The paper, however, leaves it open (even doesn’t mention the result in the discussion) if this is any specific A. lwofii effect or just some some LPS effect that antagonized the vitamin D containing food.

So no news even 10 years after the initial Acinetobacter hype. The only verified fact remain several deaths caused by Acinetobacter in newborns.

Vitamins

A serious backslash

10.10.2018 Matthias Wjst

It is a serious backslash to the pro vitamin D lobby that has been published in the Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology last week.

Our findings suggest that vitamin D supplementation does not prevent fractures or falls, or have clinically meaningful effects on bone mineral density. There were no differences between the effects of higher and lower doses of vitamin D. There is little justification to use vitamin D supplements to maintain or improve musculoskeletal health.

Odds ratio 1.00. There is nothing to add.

Video

Neuronal plasticity

9.10.2018 Matthias Wjst

Allergy, Genetics

Finding the allergy cause

9.10.2018 Matthias Wjst

Genomics did not really help to explain allergic mechanisms beyond IL33. But combining now stem cell & immune cell Identity tracking looks like a promising strategy for identifying initial disease events. At least colleagues at the MDC think so.

LifeTime – ein visionärer Vorschlag für ein EU-Flagschiff. Zuverlässig vorherzusagen, wann eine Krankheit ausbricht oder wie sie verläuft, erscheint wie ein Traum. Ein europäisches Konsortium will ihn Wirklichkeit werden lassen und dabei vor allem neue Technologien der Einzelzellbiologie nutzen. Führende Forscherinnen und Forscher haben daher einen Antrag für ein FET-Flagschiff mit dem Namen LifeTime eingereicht.

Genetics, Software

New insights by single-cell genomics

9.10.2018 Matthias Wjst

Congress report Annual AGD Meeting 2018, Potsdam Oct. 5–6

Welcome and Opening of Symposium by Peter Nürnberg, President of the AGD and Joachim L. Schultze, Chair of the Program Committee.

The AGD meeting was interesting and a great primer for all of us who are not directly working with single cells.

Maybe it is an unusual research field – dissecting clean single cells in the first stage. But then single cell means single cell experiment that cannot be replicated. The current readout is RNA content at a given time while genomics and proteomics still need to be integrated. Experiments cover mainly those abundant RNAs and even only the 3′ ends while the statistical analysis is mainly a 2 dimensional PCA to separate cell clusters. Unfortunately PCA is known to overfit noise and it is not clear to me what happens whenever transcripts are missing. So the newly identified cell cluster need careful confirmation (only the talk of Andreas Schlitzer linked the data science of scRNA clustering with conventional textbook knowledge). Lastly – scRNA looks like a very expensive approach...

Continue reading New insights by single-cell genomics →