New applications of DNA and RNA sequencing are expanding the field of biodiversity discovery and ecological monitoring, yet questions remain regarding precision and efficiency. Due to primer bias, the ability of metabarcoding to accurately depict biomass of different taxa from bulk communities remains unclear, while PCR-free whole mitochondrial genome (mitogenome) sequencing may provide a more reliable alternative. Here, we used a set of documented mock communities comprising 13 species of freshwater macroinvertebrates of estimated individual biomass, to compare the detection efficiency of COI metabarcoding (three different amplicons) and shotgun mitogenome sequencing. Additionally, we used individual COI barcoding and de novo mitochondrial genome sequencing, to provide reference sequences for OTU assignment and metagenome mapping (mitogenome skimming), respectively. We found that, even though both methods occasionally failed to recover very low abundance species, metabarcoding was less consistent, by failing to recover some species with higher abundances, probably due to primer bias. Shotgun sequencing results provided highly significant correlations between read number and biomass in all but one species. Conversely, the read-biomass relationships obtained from metabarcoding varied across amplicons. Specifically, we found significant relationships for eight of 13 (amplicons B1FR-450 bp, FF130R-130 bp) or four of 13 (amplicon FFFR, 658 bp) species. Combining the results of all three COI amplicons (multiamplicon approach) improved the read-biomass correlations for some of the species. Overall, mitogenomic sequencing yielded more informative predictions of biomass content from bulk macroinvertebrate communities than metabarcoding. However, for large-scale ecological studies, metabarcoding currently remains the most commonly used approach for diversity assessment.

In this paper two current police research traditions are examined, the critical police research and policy police research, as they have evolved in the USA, the UK, and in Australia. Each tradition has developed a typical pattern of relationship between researchers and police practitioners, but both suffered from what we call the 'dialogue of the deaf.' While acknowledging the continuing importance of each approach to police research, we suggest the need for a third new approach to be developed in which academics and police work in close and continuous collaborative relationships. IntroductionWe will come to the 'dialogue of the deaf,' and our efforts to end it, later. Enough to say for now that it refers to a sort of mutual misunderstanding that negatively impacts on the police-academics relationship.In this paper we first look at two kinds of research traditions that have taken the police as their subject matter, and for each, we explore how they have impacted upon policing policies and practices. We call the first the critical police research tradition, the second, the policy police research tradition. Each tradition has different aims, networks, and organizational and funding arrangements. Each has had a different impact upon the public police.As we will demonstrate, the critical research tradition prides itself on its detachment and independence from the police as subject matter, and, almost always, manages to find fault with rather than celebrate the role and activities of the public police. It does not seek to directly change the police but to contribute through its expert voice and publications to the thinking of governments and legislators.In contrast to the critical police research tradition, the policy police research tradition was founded to provide the theories, ideas, and evidence through the application of which the police might be improved. Its researchers, then, are committed to a much closer engagement with the police than the other tradition, seeking to alter policing policies and practices, getting the police to adopt policies and practices for which evidence exists that they work, abandoning those that do not, and subjecting all of what it does to research-based evaluation.We will look at examples of these two networks across the USA, the UK, and from Australia. We mostly focus upon the policy research tradition, and explain why, both in the USA and the UK, its impact upon policing has not been as impressive as it promised to be, primarily because of systemic deficiencies in the interface between the police and the police researchers.

Protein–protein interactions (PPIs) between modular binding domains and their target peptide motifs are thought to largely depend on the intrinsic binding specificities of the domains. The large family of SRC Homology 3 (SH3) domains contribute to cellular processes via their ability to support such PPIs. While the intrinsic binding specificities of SH3 domains have been studied in vitro, whether each domain is necessary and sufficient to define PPI specificity in vivo is largely unknown. Here, by combining deletion, mutation, swapping and shuffling of SH3 domains and measurements of their impact on protein interactions in yeast, we find that most SH3s do not dictate PPI specificity independently from their host protein in vivo. We show that the identity of the host protein and the position of the SH3 domains within their host are critical for PPI specificity, for cellular functions and for key biophysical processes such as phase separation. Our work demonstrates the importance of the interplay between a modular PPI domain such as SH3 and its host protein in establishing specificity to wire PPI networks. These findings will aid understanding how protein networks are rewired during evolution and in the context of mutation-driven diseases such as cancer.