Manuscript reviews

A few weeks ago Rosie and I received our reviews for the variation-in-uptake/transformation paper. One of the reviews is really good and suggests that we do a few experiments to clarify our findings. This will not be a problem and should be done by the end of the month. The second reviewer wanted to complain about Rosie's hypothesis of DNA as a nutrient more than they wanted to critically review the content of our submitted paper, so this review will be easy to deal with.

In addition to doing the experiments requested by the first reviewer, we have decided to add some genetic data to the paper to make it stronger. I have done some analysis with competence gene sequences from the strains with genome sequences available. There are many differences in sequence between strains and some genes appear to be pseudogenes. Therefore, there are plenty of potential causes for the differences in competence between strains, now it is time to try and narrow down which ones are the cause.