Microbiology Editing and Proofreading Services

A paper reports that the organism produces the compound under stress. The strain is named by species only. Somebody in another laboratory takes their own isolate of the same species, repeats the experiment, and gets nothing — and the two groups spend a year arguing about method when the difference was always that they were working on organisms whose genomes differ by several per cent.

We edit what microbiologists write — experimental papers and their methods, strain and culture documentation, antimicrobial susceptibility and resistance studies, microbiome and community analyses, clinical and food microbiology reports, genomic and phylogenetic papers, biosafety and protocol documentation, and theses, articles and grant applications. Our editors work on strain identity and everything that follows from it.

Strain identity is what makes a microbiology result mean anything, and the failure is an organism identified to species and treated as though that fixed it. Two isolates of the same species can differ enormously in gene content and behaviour. We work through these so the strain is named with its designation and its source — a culture collection accession, a clinical or environmental isolate with its provenance, or a constructed strain with its parent and genotype — since a species name identifies a group, not an organism; so the passage history and storage are stated where phenotype drifts, because laboratory-adapted strains and freshly isolated ones are not the same material; so the identification method is given rather than assumed, given that species assignment by one gene, by mass spectrometry and by whole genome are different claims; so growth conditions are specified completely — medium with its formulation, temperature, atmosphere, agitation, inoculum and growth phase at sampling — as the phase at which cells were harvested changes most measured outcomes; so any genetic modification is described with the construct, the method and the verification; so controls include the parent strain and a reference strain where one exists; and so deposit or availability of the strain is stated. Papers written this way get reproduced instead of disputed.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished results, isolate data and clinical information. We are editors rather than microbiologists, and we offer no view on identification, methods or results. What we can do is pin the organism down on the page.