The mutant simulation experiments show realistic results, and only one mutant (out of five) could not fully be reproduced.
As suggested by the reviewer, we are now incorporating the data on the time spent by the mutant out of 25 ns in the local conformations in the file sent to the user through e-mail.
There are other sensitive assays for KRAS detection such as the Allele Specific Competitive Blocker Polymerase Chain Reaction (ACB-PCR) that can detect KRAS mutations fractions as low as 0.001% (1 mutant out of 100,000 wild-type) [8].
Assaying for cysteine sulfhydryl content revealed anywhere from 0.1 1.1 free thiols per mutant out of an expected 2. The blocked cysteine residues, which were not characterized in this study, likely existed as disulfides with cysteine or glutathione.
One mutant out of the 3600 screened showed dark red colony color on low adenine medium plate and was identified as an ade7 - insertion mutant (Table 2 and mutant 13_C10 in Additional file 2: Table S1).
Expression of >400 genes was shown to be upregulated in the Salmonella hns mutant, out of which more than 90% were acquired by the horizontal gene transfer (Navarre et al., 2006).
