Misidentified biomedical resources: Journal guidelines are not a quick fix.

Biomedical researchers routinely use a variety of biological models and resources, such as cultured cell lines, antibodies and laboratory animals. Unfortunately, these resources are not flawless: cell lines can be misidentified; for antibodies, problems with specificity, lot-to-lot consistency and sensitivity are common; and the reliability of animal models is questioned due to poor translation of animal studies to human clinical trials. In some cases, these problems can render the results of a study meaningless.

The effect of journal guidelines on the reporting of antibody validation.

Background: Despite the widespread use of antibodies as a research tool, problems with specificity, lot-to-lot consistency and sensitivity commonly occur and may be important contributing factors to the 'replication crisis' in biomedical research. This makes the validation of antibodies and accurate reporting of this validation in the scientific literature extremely important. Therefore, some journals now require authors to comply with antibody reporting guidelines.

Evolutionary selection of pestivirus variants with altered or no microRNA dependency.

Host microRNA (miRNA) dependency is a hallmark of the human pathogen hepatitis C virus (HCV) and was also described for the related pestiviruses, which are important livestock pathogens. The liver-specific miR-122 binds within the HCV 5' untranslated region (UTR), whereas the broadly expressed let-7 and miR-17 families bind two sites (S1 and S2, respectively) in the pestiviral 3' UTR. Here, we dissected the mechanism of miRNA dependency of the pestivirus bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVDV).