J~ and I recently submitted my first first-author manuscript to Evolution. The reviews came back fairly positive, but there were some things that they would like changed. In total, I thought the reviews were really reasonable and I've already started collecting some extra data.
The main issue that they had was that I present evidence that some genes are properly imprinted in hamsters, some are polymorphic in their imprinting status within cross types, and some are expressed from two alleles in both hybrids. None of these patterns can explain POE growth as in all cases the two reciprocal hybrids show the same patterns. The reviewers were concerned that as I don't know the imprinting status of these alleles within each species, it is hard ("impossible" was the word they used) to interpret whether imprinting is breaking down in the hybrids. To address this apparent shortcoming, I'm planning on doing two things. First, making the writing clearer. I need to make it clear that if we see the same pattern of expression in hybrids, it cannot explain POE growth, regardless of whether the gene is imprinted in the parentals or not. While I think that should be sufficient, I am also planning on collecting more data in the form of a qPCR experiment. If I can show that the expression level is the same between parentals and hybrids, that is good evidence that the gene is not disrupted in the hybrids, and is therefore not imprinted in the parents. This should be easy(-ish) data to collect and so I'm going forth with some qPCR experiments.
There were other minor things, but all can be addressed in the text fairly easily. Hopefully I can turn this around and get it back to the reviewers soon.
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