ABSTRACT
Journal authorship practices have not sufficiently evolved to reflect the way research is now done. Improvements to support teams, collaboration, and open science are urgently needed.
Subject(s)
AuthorshipABSTRACT
Trust in science increases when scientists and the outlets certifying their work honor science's norms. Scientists often fail to signal to other scientists and, perhaps more importantly, the public that these norms are being upheld. They could do so as they generate, certify, and react to each other's findings: for example, by promoting the use and value of evidence, transparent reporting, self-correction, replication, a culture of critique, and controls for bias. A number of approaches for authors and journals would lead to more effective signals of trustworthiness at the article level. These include article badging, checklists, a more extensive withdrawal ontology, identity verification, better forward linking, and greater transparency.
ABSTRACT
In keeping with the growing movement in scientific publishing toward transparency in data and methods, we propose changes to journal authorship policies and procedures to provide insight into which author is responsible for which contributions, better assurance that the list is complete, and clearly articulated standards to justify earning authorship credit. To accomplish these goals, we recommend that journals adopt common and transparent standards for authorship, outline responsibilities for corresponding authors, adopt the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) (docs.casrai.org/CRediT) methodology for attributing contributions, include this information in article metadata, and require authors to use the ORCID persistent digital identifier (https://orcid.org). Additionally, we recommend that universities and research institutions articulate expectations about author roles and responsibilities to provide a point of common understanding for discussion of authorship across research teams. Furthermore, we propose that funding agencies adopt the ORCID identifier and accept the CRediT taxonomy. We encourage scientific societies to further authorship transparency by signing on to these recommendations and promoting them through their meetings and publications programs.
ABSTRACT
X-linked adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD) is a severe brain demyelinating disease in boys that is caused by a deficiency in ALD protein, an adenosine triphosphate-binding cassette transporter encoded by the ABCD1 gene. ALD progression can be halted by allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT). We initiated a gene therapy trial in two ALD patients for whom there were no matched donors. Autologous CD34+ cells were removed from the patients, genetically corrected ex vivo with a lentiviral vector encoding wild-type ABCD1, and then re-infused into the patients after they had received myeloablative treatment. Over a span of 24 to 30 months of follow-up, we detected polyclonal reconstitution, with 9 to 14% of granulocytes, monocytes, and T and B lymphocytes expressing the ALD protein. These results strongly suggest that hematopoietic stem cells were transduced in the patients. Beginning 14 to 16 months after infusion of the genetically corrected cells, progressive cerebral demyelination in the two patients stopped, a clinical outcome comparable to that achieved by allogeneic HCT. Thus, lentiviral-mediated gene therapy of hematopoietic stem cells can provide clinical benefits in ALD.
Subject(s)
ATP-Binding Cassette Transporters/genetics , Adrenoleukodystrophy/therapy , Genetic Therapy , Genetic Vectors , HIV-1/genetics , Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation , Hematopoietic Stem Cells/physiology , ATP Binding Cassette Transporter, Subfamily D, Member 1 , Adrenoleukodystrophy/genetics , Adrenoleukodystrophy/pathology , Animals , Brain/pathology , Cell Differentiation , Cell Lineage , Child , Disease Progression , Fatty Acids/blood , Female , Gene Expression , Hematopoiesis , Hematopoietic Stem Cells/virology , Humans , Leukocytes, Mononuclear/metabolism , Male , Mice , Microglia/cytology , Microglia/metabolism , Myeloablative Agonists/therapeutic use , Transduction, Genetic , Transplantation Conditioning , Transplantation, Autologous , Virus IntegrationABSTRACT
A combined reanalysis of the two largest yeast protein-protein interaction studies to date provides a large consolidated data set, with a level of accuracy matching the reliability of small-scale experiments.
Subject(s)
Protein Interaction Mapping , Bayes Theorem , Saccharomyces cerevisiae Proteins/chemistryABSTRACT
A new resource allows researchers to match the gene-expression signature of their system of interest to that of well-characterized chemical compounds-a hypothesis-generation tool with a bright future.
Subject(s)
Database Management Systems , Databases, Protein , Gene Expression Profiling/methods , Information Storage and Retrieval/methods , Peptide Mapping/methods , Protein Interaction Mapping/methods , User-Computer InterfaceABSTRACT
Chromosome conformation capture (3C) graduates to a tool for mapping interaction networks, thanks to a clever way of making molecular 'carbon copies'.
Subject(s)
Chromosomes/genetics , Genomics/methods , Regulatory Elements, Transcriptional , Gene Expression Regulation , Nucleic Acid Conformation , Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis/instrumentation , Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis/methods , Polymerase Chain ReactionABSTRACT
UK researchers have devised a method of chromatin immunoprecipitation that requires as little as 100 cells, opening the door to epigenetics studies in primary cells and embryos.
