We assumed 70% tumour tissue in each sample, making this a conservative estimate of copy number.
The relatively high degree of variation, particularly in the African samples, makes this parasite remarkable.
Additionally, the use of banked cryopreserved PBMC samples makes this assay attractive in the setting of large efficacy trials where it is less feasible to perform immunoassays on freshly isolated samples.
It should be noted that the relationship between expression and copy number is complex, and that the absence of significant correlations does not exclude the presence of the CNA, especially in cases where the low count of genes or samples makes this correlation statistically difficult to prove.
The wide range of transcript expression in biological samples makes this skewed read distribution of coverage an important factor when profiling mRNAs at the nucleotide level, departing from models that may assume a linear correlation between transcript abundance and sequencing coverage.
Similarly, the positive validation of the down-regulated genes in a separate set of samples makes this observation stronger.
While circulating tumour cells (CTCs) have shown promise in this area, the ability to quickly and reliably detect the levels of specific proteins in patient blood samples makes this approach attractive over other strategies [22].
MRI and pathological response at definitive surgery provide robust and quantitative early-outcome measures, and the availability of pre- and post-treatment tissue samples makes this an ideal setting in which to investigate new drug combinations and associated biomarkers.
Our model, which is very well suited to study the early step of infection, will also need to be further evaluated for its capacity to generate chronic (i.e. granulomatous) lesions as well as translated to human samples, although the paucity of such samples makes this a difficult task.
The removal of this sample makes the positive correlation between OP-1 and HA in the OA group statistically significant (P < 0.045).
We would like to thank all scientists who shared their samples, making this study of dirivultids possible.
