Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2019 May 16

Science desk
< May 15	<< Apr | May | Jun >>	May 17 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Science Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

May 16

Reviewers of paper

This paper lists: "Reviewers: F.U.H., Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry; A.H., Technion–Israel Institute of Technology; and W.P.T., Vanderbilt University School of Medicine."

What does that mean? Are those the paper's referees? I thought referees were supposed to be anonymous. Is it a special PNAS thing, replacing "commnuicated by"? Clicking a couple other PNAS papers I see reviewers listed on one, and "this is a PNAS direct submission" on another. I believe in the old days PNAS was a non-refereed house journal for NAS, i.e. they'd print anything a NAS member sent in, either on their own behalf or someone else's. Maybe this is a vestige? 173.228.123.207 (talk) 16:54, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

The reviewers are the referees, by another name (although it's called peer review for a reason) - see here. See this for more information about the submission options. The reviewers can in many journals choose whether they wish to remain anonymous. Mikenorton (talk) 17:03, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

Thanks. 173.228.123.207 (talk) 09:14, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

de novo RNA-Seq on a "human-related" alien

Scenario (really for flexibility reasons): an alien species, putatively related to homo sapiens, crashes on Earth and at a certain stage in invasive biomedical investigation of the survivors, we decide to perform RNA-Seq on them. Suppose we don't know that much about their genome, that it is related enough to have human-like biochemistry but that there are possibly lots of foreign / unrelated sequences. How do you perform Serial analysis of gene expression-RNA-Seq de novo if say we are unsure of the exact variability of this related genome, i.e. we don't have an existing library? (P.S. this is a question about de novo RNA-Seq, I decided to make it about an alien species v. an arbitrary species to make the question more provocative.) Yanping Nora Soong (talk) 19:13, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

To clarify -- possibly this species has new or nonhomologous genes in their genome we don't have, but otherwise might share enough relatedness to do a meaningful comparison of our transcriptomes. Yanping Nora Soong (talk) 19:14, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

RNA-Seq is, well, shotgun sequencing. Given an alien to work with, this seems like a potentially useful technology. If the alien's RNA is a little different than Earthly RNA, then it is possible that the reverse transcription process could be 'tweaked' a bit, by screening reverse transcriptases or doing in vitro evolution on them to find some that will pair some unknown bases in the alien RNA with known nucleotides in a cDNA strand. Even if the strands had more than four bases, evolving different enzymes to do the reverse transcription differently might get 'cDNA's that could be logically compared to unravel the original sequence. (Though there is already interesting work done involving novel DNA bases to increase the repertoire... ah, Hachimoji DNA was the name)

At my guess, SAGE seems like a convenience you'd use only after you had gotten to know the alien genome quite well, at which point you wouldn't have some of the questions you suggest above. Wnt (talk) 22:37, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

Volume of non-ideal mixtures

What is the volume of a non-ideal mixture obtained from equal volumes of pure components such as water and ethanol? What info are necessary to determine this volume of the mixture, besides presumably density tables for ethanol-water? Thanks!--109.166.136.207 (talk) 21:41, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

How do the partial molar volumes and the apparent molar volumes occur in the calculation expression of the volume of the mixture? --109.166.136.207 (talk) 21:49, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

Ethanol in water is not an ideal solution, nor even a regular solution. See [1] for a basic introduction. I'll admit I have no idea how to calculate this volume, but I bet someone here does... Wnt (talk) 22:45, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

Our Partial molar property article, the target of the volume of mixing redirect, has lots of math. DMacks (talk) 22:52, 17 May 2019 (UTC)