Jessica Purcell
Assistant Professor
Department of Entomology
University of California, Riverside
jpurcell@ucr.edu
phone:951-827-7258




Blog

Notes on two recent publications

January, 2020
Jessica Purcell

I have become aware of several recent article retractions that involved a co-author, Dr. Jonathan Pruitt. In the interest of transparency and ensuring that published results are sound, my co-authors and I are posting the raw data associated with our article “Social context, but not individual personality, alters immigrant viability in a spider with mixed social structure,” which was published in Animal Behaviour in 2016. The upload to Dryad is currently pending. A link will be posted shortly. Spencer Ingley and I are in the process of carefully checking these data, but we would like to immediately share them with the scientific community as well.

All data associated with the article entitled “Are personalities genetically determined? Inferences from subsocial spiders” published recently in BMC Genomics are available online (either in the electronic supplementary materials or on NCBI SRA). I personally carried out all DNA extraction, library preparation for RADseq (and I delivered materials to the University of Lausanne Genomics Core for whole genome library preparation), and I analyzed the sequence data. I collected the samples (along with Dr. Pruitt) from three out of four field sites. Undergraduate students working for Dr. Pruitt collected the boldness data on each individual before we shipped the samples to Switzerland. I am carrying out additional tests to verify the validity of the GWAS results presented in that paper.