i already crossed off severum. BP project just started. Unlike me, my collegue might not want to release his results until he publishes them.
for my project, mine is for the purpose of ending the malaysian flowerhorn monoply. If someone else steals our work, then at least it would still help to bring the prices down. (who know?? maybe some malaysian breeders will pay big money for me to keep it secret lol)
I wonder if I could ask a few question?
Firstly, where is the backing for this project coming from? I know you have said that it is to end the malaysian monopoly, but if you are doing gene seqeucing with a team of around 100 people, then the costs of running it will be in the millions a week ( The cost of my ex's gene sequencing work was in the tens of thousands a week, and that was her working with just her proffessor for her Ph.D). I wonder if you could explain the source of their backing? I.e, is it done as a thesis or piece of Post Doc work? if so, which institution or funding body would be paying for this? ( I'd like to know for if I ever do my post doc and want some serious money! )
Also, why would you take samples from Gametes? Surely at that stage, you would be getting very high numbers of stem cells, which wouldn't be hugely useful to work from? Would you not want a "defined" to accurately match the indicator pairs?
If your working out what the genetic makeup of the flowerhorns are, surely you need a full or at least very nearly complete genetic sequence for all the various candidates. Looking on google, Journal Spy, British Library etc, I can't find that these have ever been publish for the fish in question. Could you state your source of them so I could have a look at them?
Why would a multi-million pound/dollar project be sourcing specimins as dead fish from the LFS? Surely this breaks all possibility of ensuring true scientific study and the ability to re-create results, meaning that it automatically would fail publishing when it went to peer review? Would you not source directly from a vivisection breeders so that the experiment can be repeated from a single line?
Which journal will you publish this in? How will you get it passed peer review based on the above? I ask becuase surely, in fact I am absolutely certain, there is no way that you would have been able to secure funding on the scale that you have if the work isn't published, either to push it into the open domain, or ( and I guess this is the case based on your mayalsian vbreeders comment ) if you/your backers wish to ensure that no patents can be taken out following your research?
To be honest, while what you are saying may be true, I have very grave doubts it, and currently believe it to be a fairy tale, having worked in a chemistry department that supported biosciences and lived through a thesis AND a post doc on gene sequencing by my ex. What you are saying I simply can't reconcile with what I know to be the case.
I would be interested in your answers to the above questions.
Steve