As the aim of the PREreview Journal Club is to support the authors by providing constructive feedback, the reviewer(s) should also include positive remarks to encourage future posting of preprints. Remember, the authors are human too! To help guide you, here are a few questions you might ask yourself after reading the preprint:
What result did you find the most interesting and why?
- The Daphnia-Pasteuria system is a very interesting and appropriate system to study transgenerational effects. The fact that Daphnia is parthenogenic and produces clonal offspring is an amazing advantage that the authors utilize well in this study.
What did you learn from their research that really fascinated you?
- There is evidence for immune priming conserved from parents to offspring in several invertebrate systems.
Did you think of any future exciting directions this research could take, or future experiments the researchers could try? Try to include experiments that are not critical to this particular preprint but the research area in general.
- Transmitting acquired traits, like immune memory, from parents to offspring is an exciting prospect. However, in this direct, single-generation transmission, there are many confounding factors. Parental infection could affect offspring in myriad ways, such as decreased offspring size to name only one. This is especially true in this system where the parasite directly influences host reproduction. It is for this reason that transgenerational inheritance is often studied across multiple generations. It would be extremely interesting to see the authors extend this work into the F2 and F3 generations and determine if immune priming persists past the generation directly derived from the infected parent.
Did you learn anything from this preprint that you would include in your future work? Examples could be a new technique, a new way of approaching an idea, a certain way of interpreting the type of data, a good way of summarising the results, the structure of the manuscript if it is clear and logical, etc.
What ideas for further research are based on the preprint? [Note: this encourages preprint authors for their early sharing and promotes openness among reviewers as well.]