Something kinda oooooh
| 18 May, 2010 | Richard P. Grant |
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I get to see some strange papers while trolling the F1000 website for the Faculty Dailies. Today I read about a teenager who spontaneously recovered from rabies, and more than I ever wanted to know about bile acids. And I quote,
Amazingly, vitamin A completely rescued Fgf15 and Shp expression and reversed the derepression of Cyp7a1 caused by interrupted bile acid reabsorption in cholestyramine-treated animals.
That’s not what grabbed my attention, though. Back in my thesis days I did a few experiments with liposomes, so am no stranger to their strange and beautiful nomenclature. But the Methods section in this paper is something else entirely, and I’ve decided to share some of it with you.
After all, why should I suffer alone?
The following unconjugated and taurine-conjugated bile acids were used as calibration standards: cholic acid (5
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Not really “unreadable” per se, but a certain paper by *ahem* me contained, as a result of a certain *ahem* journal’s editorial policy about how things need to be stated, this absolutely awful sentence:
For gel shift assays, we took nuclear extracts (10 ug) from HeLa cells, left some untreated, heat-shocked some at 42 C for 2 h and incubated some with 20 uM arachidonic acid for 30 min.
Ick. “Some” this, “some” that. They also required first-person narrative:
We used digoxigenin-UTP-labeled sense or antisense riboprobes for whole-mount in situ hybridizations as described. We used antibodies to digoxigenin confugated with alkaline phosphatatse to detect hybridized probes. We counter-stained sections with Fast Nuclear Red (Dako). We used monoclonal antibodies (Dako) against cytokeratin AE1/AE3 (1:100), CD20 (1:500), CD42 (1:400) and CD68 (1:100) for immunostaining.
We did this, we did that, we are all here together, we are the Walrus, goo goo g’joob.
This is in response to:
Something kinda oooooh by Megan S.
I don’t quite agree. Anyone accustomed to SciWriting will make a mental note as under~
1. The following unconjugated and taurine-conjugated bile acids were used as calibration standards: ***** …….. *****
2. Deuterium-labeled cholic acid and chenodeoxycholic acid were used as recovery controls.
3. Norcholic acid was used as the sample loading control. The author could have made the assertions and details could have been furnished as a Table or an appendix.
No wonder Scientific Writing is a big business; so is ghost authoring!