Counting the cost of misconduct

Last week at Retraction Watch (RW) there was a post on a paper in elife by Andrew Stern, Arturo Casadevall, Grant Steen, and Ferric Fang that put a figure on the cost of research misconduct, using misconduct officially identified by the ORI.

A number of comments on RW, including my own, highlighted that the study necessarily (because it had to use hard data) resulted in an underestimate of the financial cost of misconduct by a least a factor of 10. I thought it useful to summarise my views in what follows.

Read Full Post »

Dr Katie Wilson

Congratulations to Katie Wilson who had a very successful and enjoyable thesis defence today!

Read Full Post »

Ruoyan’s paper on the diversification of the structural determinants of fibroblast growth factor-heparin interactions published

Ruoyan’s paper on “Diversification of the structural determinants of fibroblast growth factor-heparin interactions; implications for binding specificity” has been accepted for publication at the Journal of Biological Chemistry. The heart of her PhD thesis, this paper takes a hard look at the specificity of the interactions of six FGFs spanning five subfamilies with heparin and allied polysaccharides. She dissects the sites in the FGFs that are responsible for binding the sugars using the “Protect and Label” approach and the sites in the sugar that the FGFs binds using a combination of DSF, SRCD, biosensors and sugar libraries. As ever in biology, in important regulatory interactions there isn’t one binding site, instead these FGFs recognise what are best described as families of consensus sites in the sugar. Specificity in these consensus binding sites is elegantly illustrated by PCA and specificity maps to the evolutionary relationships of the FGFs.

Read Full Post »