Bob hints that I have an alternative hypothesis as to a marker or cause of
CCD, and that's true. We've several lines of evidence pointing to N.
cernae acting with another pathogen, which has proven difficult to fully
identify. We're not trying to hold back anything, but we are trying to get our
hypothesis with ALL of the supporting lines of evidence published.
We've assembled a large team of mostly volunteer scientists, since the
Wide Area study money went to the USDA labs, and the other big funding
package, CAPS went to the ag schools. We're working on small amounts of funding,
and lots of 'free' help. So, we're slow.
We've been trying to get this published since December. We just submitted
it to another journal this morning, and I sincerely hope this journal
accepts it. Its been extensively rewritten, edited with a fine tooth comb, and
new lines of evidence added.
As you all remember, Science published the initial paper that concluded
that IAPV was a marker of CCD and implied it might be a cause of CCD,
pointing to Australia as the source of the IAPV. That paper reached a very broad
audience, and had a big impact on the public, researchers, and especially
funding agencies. We'd like to reach the same audience with our
alternative hypothesis.
However, Science proved to be a hard sell - first saying that CCD was not
of general interest (I guess its old news), then offering other excuses.
After each, we addressed the issues, re-submitted.
We did get them to review the full manuscript in February. The reviewers
were mostly positive about our work - but we got a mix of rankings, from
'publish' by a world expert in bee diseases (I heard from the reviewer after
the rejection by Science), to this work is interesting, but its flawed,
because 'proteomics can't ID pathogens to strain level' (when in fact our
colleagues have not only shown that this can be done by proteomics, and they
had their paper on this very topic published by Nature), and finally, we had
the reviewer who apparently read only the abstracts from miscellaneous IAPV
papers, because he/she misquoted all of them.
He/she concluded that we had to be wrong, because IAPV has been shown to
be the marker/cause of CCD, and then cites another paper as evidence that
iRNA cures CCD, and finally claims that transcriptome research points to DWV
and BCV as contributing to CCD.
With each review, we seem to have the 'good' fortune of drawing one or more
reviewers who are still committed to IAPV as a cause of CCD.
Unfortunately for us, our data shows that IAPV, although common on the east coast, and
scattered on the west coast, is NOT correlated with CCD.
That statement makes the IAPV camp see red. As such, we get mixed
reviews. Major journals look for reasons to reject manuscripts, so any negative
reviews and you're likely to be rejected. So, here's hoping we get
accepted, so that everyone can see what we have found - its complicated. I'd
rather everyone has the full document - which stands at 46 pages. As we've seen
from this list, partial summaries tend to lead to misinterpretation. I
look forward to being able to openly discuss and debate our findings, but
only after everyone can see all that we've found.
Do we have the definitive answer - no. But, I think we've made progress,
and I think its important. However, until we get published, I will simply
say that we think N. ceranae is part of the problem. Nosema by itself, you
may be ok, but combine it with other pathogens and you've a different
scenario. And we think there is one in particular that is closely associated
with Nosema. Get the two, and you will likely experience CCD. At the
moment, there is no cure for the 'other pathogen', but there are things you can
do about Nosema - maybe not the best tools around, but you can monitor
Nosema, and try to keep it under control.
The Nosema/pathogen combo may be a marker, they could cause CCD, or they
could be a consequence of CCD - whichever, we always see the pair in failing
colonies.
In the meantime, I'm going to frame my rejection from Science - I am still
amazed that a Science editor would offer as a reason for rejecting the
manuscript: Publishing an alternative hypothesis to IAPV, would just muddy the
waters.
Glad Galileo didn't have to try publishing with them. Reason we've turned
to a different journal.
Jerry
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