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The work elaborates on the question if coaches in non-professional soccer can influence referee decisions. Modeled from a principal-agent perspective, the managing referee boards can be seen as the principal. They aim at facilitating a fair competition which is in accordance with the existing rules and regulations. In doing so, the referees are assigned as impartial agents on the pitch. The coaches take over a non-legitimate principal-like role trying to influence the referees even though they do not have the formal right to do so.
Separate questionnaires were set up for referees and coaches. The coach questionnaire aimed at identifying the extent and the forms of influencing attempts by coaches. The referee questionnaire tried to elaborate on the questions if referees take notice of possible influencing attempts and how they react accordingly.
The results were put into relation with official match data in order to identify significant influences on personal sanctions (yellow cards, second yellow cards, red cards) and the match result.
It is found that there is a slight effect on the referee’s decisions. However, this effect is rather disadvantageous for the influencing coach and there is no evidence for an impact on the match result itself.
Translation of protein from mRNA is a complex multi-step process that occurs at a non-uniform rate. Variability in ribosome speed along an mRNA enables refinement of the proteome and plays a critical role in protein biogenesis. Detailed single protein studies have found both tRNA abundance and mRNA secondary structure as key modulators of translation elongation rate, but recent genome-wide ribosome profiling experiments have not observed significant influence of either on translation efficiency. Here we provide evidence that this results from an inherent trade-off between these factors. We find codons pairing to high-abundance tRNAs are preferentially used in regions of high secondary structure content, while codons read by significantly less abundant tRNAs are located in lowly structured regions. By considering long stretches of high and low mRNA secondary structure in Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Escherichia coli and comparing them to randomized-gene models and experimental expression data, we were able to distinguish clear selective pressures and increased protein expression for specific codon choices. The trade-off between secondary structure and tRNA-concentration based codon choice allows for compensation of their independent effects on translation, helping to smooth overall translational speed and reducing the chance of potentially detrimental points of excessively slow or fast ribosome movement.
Properly designed (randomized and/or balanced) experiments are standard in ecological research. Molecular methods are increasingly used in ecology, but studies generally do not report the detailed design of sample processing in the laboratory. This may strongly influence the interpretability of results if the laboratory procedures do not account for the confounding effects of unexpected laboratory events. We demonstrate this with a simple experiment where unexpected differences in laboratory processing of samples would have biased results if randomization in DNA extraction and PCR steps do not provide safeguards. We emphasize the need for proper experimental design and reporting of the laboratory phase of molecular ecology research to ensure the reliability and interpretability of results.