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closeWe also found transfer of alimentary transposon DNA
Posted by JonaBlom on 31 Oct 2014 at 10:57 GMT
Dear Spisak et al,
We read your paper with great inerest. You may have missed our paper ("Uptake of transposon DNA from the human alimentary tract", Forsman et al, Mol Genet Genomics 270:362-368 (2003). The time dependent appearance of alimentary DNA 1-3 hours post a meal cannot be explained by contamination.
Our paper only demonstrated uptake of DNA fragments. Yo have evidence for uptake of larger DNA segments.
Jonas Blomberg
RE: We also found transfer of alimentary transposon DNA
agonzalez5411 replied to JonaBlom on 31 Oct 2014 at 16:20 GMT
Deep work and complementary!
On the other hand, there is a question that must be answered in relation to containation evident: How to ensure that the laboratory that develops GMOs does not have contaminated their products, if they are not manufactured as indicate RLuks?
RE: We also found transfer of alimentary transposon DNA
rlusk replied to JonaBlom on 31 Oct 2014 at 18:04 GMT
My main issue with Spisak et al's paper, here, was that they didn't have a real negative control. I read your paper, and I didn't see one there, either-- where were the samples from the person that didn't eat rabbit meat? The issues with amplifying trace contaminants using PCR when you're looking for small quantities of foreign DNA are both huge and very well established (see the first few references in my manuscript: http://www.plosone.org/ar...).
I'm also not as convinced that your results have a clear temporal signal-- in fig. 1, you have one line that seems to support your conclusion, one line that doesn't really say much-- the rabbit DNA shows up once, then disappears-- and one line that shows exactly the opposite, a off-and-on _increase_ over time. And those three lines are only a subset of the data you collected; the rest of the data looks worse.
RE: We also found transfer of alimentary transposon DNA
Spisak replied to JonaBlom on 31 Oct 2014 at 20:10 GMT
Great work and thanks for the notes. We tried to cite all of the available publications, but we missed some of them. Here is a list to upgrade the references;
http://link.springer.com/...
http://www.pnas.org/conte...
http://www.plosone.org/ar...