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closeThanks for Making an Important Point
Posted by slaval on 21 Feb 2014 at 12:25 GMT
I agree with your analysis in general and agree completely that this is an important alternative explanation. However, the implications of the study are profound, and so should not be dismissed out of hand. One question - under your simpler explanation one would predict that the level of contamination would be more or less constant across all samples provided the volumes and concentrations were equivalent. However, Spisak et al. have found marked variations in plant material between different samples. Is this consistent with your simpler explanation?
RE: Thanks for Making an Important Point
rlusk replied to slaval on 21 Feb 2014 at 15:16 GMT
That's an excellent point.
I'm going to post a preprint of the manuscript I referred to in my previous comment so that you can see the data that I was referring to. In figure four, I show that even among cells prepared from the same tissue and processed in parallel the levels of contamination recovered can vary over orders of magnitude.