An anatomy of Turkish football match-fixing

While discussion on corruption in sport is intensifying and football match-fixing in particular is attracting increasing attention, new fixing scandals emerge offering new accounts of actors and corrupt practices within the football industry and the level of the external threat to the sport. The scandal exposure of fixed matches in Turkey in 2011 sheds light on the fixing of 17 matches played in the 2010/11 football season and allowed for insights to the actors, structure and processes behind the fix. Following four criminal and seven disciplinary proceedings, the case is still pending appeal for its final decision, involving a total of 93 suspects and having already resulted in the exclusion of two teams from European competitions. The evidence collected by the authorities points towards a hierarchical criminal organisation led by the President of a football club that arranged and coordinated the fixing in order for his team to win the national Championship. The aim of this article is to provide an account of the organisation and coordination of match-fixing in Turkey, with its actors, specifics and criminal characteristics, while offering an examination of match-fixing for sporting success, the least documented type of match-fixing

Increasing consistency of disease biomarker prediction across datasets

Microarray studies with human subjects often have limited sample sizes which hampers the ability to detect reliable biomarkers associated with disease and motivates the need to aggregate data across studies. However, human gene expression measurements may be influenced by many non-random factors such as genetics, sample preparations, and tissue heterogeneity. These factors can contribute to a lack of agreement among related studies, limiting the utility of their aggregation. We show that it is feasible to carry out an automatic correction of individual datasets to reduce the effect of such 'latent variables' (without prior knowledge of the variables) in such a way that datasets addressing the same condition show better agreement once each is corrected. We build our approach on the method of surrogate variable analysis but we demonstrate that the original algorithm is unsuitable for the analysis of human tissue samples that are mixtures of different cell types. We propose a modification to SVA that is crucial to obtaining the improvement in agreement that we observe. We develop our method on a compendium of multiple sclerosis data and verify it on an independent compendium of Parkinson's disease datasets. In both cases, we show that our method is able to improve agreement across varying study designs, platforms, and tissues. This approach has the potential for wide applicability to any field where lack of inter-study agreement has been a concern. © 2014 Chikina, Sealfon

Somatic sex-specific transcriptome differences in Drosophila revealed by whole transcriptome sequencing

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Understanding animal development and physiology at a molecular-biological level has been advanced by the ability to determine at high resolution the repertoire of mRNA molecules by whole transcriptome resequencing. This includes the ability to detect and quantify rare abundance transcripts and isoform-specific mRNA variants produced from a gene.</p> <p>The sex hierarchy consists of a pre-mRNA splicing cascade that directs the production of sex-specific transcription factors that specify nearly all sexual dimorphism. We have used deep RNA sequencing to gain insight into how the Drosophila sex hierarchy generates somatic sex differences, by examining gene and transcript isoform expression differences between the sexes in adult head tissues.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Here we find 1,381 genes that differ in overall expression levels and 1,370 isoform-specific transcripts that differ between males and females. Additionally, we find 512 genes not regulated downstream of <it>transformer </it>that are significantly more highly expressed in males than females. These 512 genes are enriched on the × chromosome and reside adjacent to dosage compensation complex entry sites, which taken together suggests that their residence on the × chromosome might be sufficient to confer male-biased expression. There are no transcription unit structural features, from a set of features, that are robustly significantly different in the genes with significant sex differences in the ratio of isoform-specific transcripts, as compared to random isoform-specific transcripts, suggesting that there is no single molecular mechanism that generates isoform-specific transcript differences between the sexes, even though the sex hierarchy is known to include three pre-mRNA splicing factors.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>We identify thousands of genes that show sex-specific differences in overall gene expression levels, and identify hundreds of additional genes that have differences in the abundance of isoform-specific transcripts. No transcription unit structural feature was robustly enriched in the sex-differentially expressed transcript isoforms. Additionally, we found that many genes with male-biased expression were enriched on the × chromosome and reside adjacent to dosage compensation entry sites, suggesting that differences in sex chromosome composition contributes to dimorphism in gene expression. Taken together, this study provides new insight into the molecular underpinnings of sexual differentiation.</p