Reader Comments

Post a new comment on this article

Very similar concept published in 2000 yet not cited

Posted by jeisen on 20 Dec 2012 at 07:07 GMT

I am very disappointed that there is no mention in this paper of a very similar concept published in 2000 by Pollock et al. (I am one of the et al.). Our paper discusses pooling mitochondrial samples from different animals prior to shotgun sequencing and then using assembly methods to pull out the different mitochondrial genomes. We even discuss the need to have divergent organisms in the pools and many of the other issues discussed here.

Our paper is available here: http://mbe.oxfordjournals...

The full citation is Pollock DD, Eisen JA, Doggett NA, Cummings MP. 2000. A case for evolutionary genomics and the comprehensive examination of sequence biodiversity. Molecular Biology and Evolution 7: 1776-1788. PMID: 11110893

I have written a bit about the similarities between the two papers in a blog post here: http://phylogenomics.blog...

No competing interests declared.

RE: Very similar concept published in 2000 yet not cited

lanzen replied to jeisen on 20 Dec 2012 at 08:15 GMT

Similar? I would say it is exactly the same concept. Perhaps the authors were not aware of it, nonetheless?

No competing interests declared.

RE: RE: Very similar concept published in 2000 yet not cited

jeisen replied to lanzen on 20 Dec 2012 at 08:21 GMT

NO idea if they were aware of it or not. But the almost certainly should have been able to find it if they had tried.

No competing interests declared.

RE: RE: RE: Very similar concept published in 2000 yet not cited

dettai replied to jeisen on 20 Dec 2012 at 15:15 GMT

Dear Prof. Eisen,
I have read the commentary you have published to our article « Conventiently pre-tagged and pre-packaged », as well as the article you have written on your blog. As main author of the article, I must say I am of course quite affected by what you wrote and I intend to clarify the situation as quickly and as efficiently as possible.
While performing bibliographic research before publication of our article, neither me nor my co-authors have encountered your article, nor references to the approach in other articles (I have of course read it immediately upon reading your comments). This was clearly an oversight on our part and we are sorry that it resulted in our not referencing your work.
The best explanation I can offer is that we were approaching the problem through the prism of new sequencing technologies. I have also focused our search more on the last seven years, when they emerged. Similarly, we checked a very large number of descriptions of the complete mitochondrial genomes in GenBank to look for NGS sequencing and did a follow up on the techniques used, but we did not encounter yours, and neither had any of the colleagues we discussed it with.
We will of course issue a correction in to our article to acknowledge the work you have published twelve years ago. Please be sure that neither our article nor the rest of our work testing our method were in any way copied off yours: we have developed the approach independently.
Best regards,
Agnes Dettai

No competing interests declared.

RE: RE: RE: RE: Very similar concept published in 2000 yet not cited

jeisen replied to dettai on 22 Dec 2012 at 18:57 GMT

Thanks for the response Agnes. In retrospect, I completely understand how hard it can be to find all the literature on a topic and since our paper was 12 years ago I can see how it would be missed.

No competing interests declared.