On 2015 Sep 10, George McNamara commented:

Over at PubPeer (where this will be mirrored to) there were questions as to why I consider the image quality of figures 1 and 2 are so bad. See the Ma et al 2013 paper - also published in PNAS. http://www.pnas.org/content/110/52/21048.figures-only

Was not that hard two years ago to publish high quality images. Nor was it that hard for Deng et al to publish good quality figure 3 or supplemental files.

On 2015 Sep 09, George McNamara commented:

The good news of this paper: open access. The bad news: figures 1 and 2 are among the worst light microscopy image quality I have seen in a long time. I don't know if PNAS completely dropped the ball on image quality (fig 3 does look ok - also the authors do get to approve or fix the page proofs), or something to do with the authors. When I was a graduate student, I thought the difference between a cell biologist and a biochemist was that a cell biologist (or their lab) had microscopes and knew how to use them, and biochemists did not and did not care. Alternative hypothesis: PNAS figures are managed by biochemists. Considering the authors are down the hall from Eric Betzig, who won a prize of high resolution microscopy (and has since published two Science papers on more high res microscopy), they could have acquired and published better images. Their centromere, telomere repeats, MUC1 and MUC4 tandem repeat targets were all previously published (and cited by them) with somewhat better image quality.

On 2015 Sep 09, George McNamara commented:

The good news of this paper: open access. The bad news: figures 1 and 2 are among the worst light microscopy image quality I have seen in a long time. I don't know if PNAS completely dropped the ball on image quality (fig 3 does look ok - also the authors do get to approve or fix the page proofs), or something to do with the authors. When I was a graduate student, I thought the difference between a cell biologist and a biochemist was that a cell biologist (or their lab) had microscopes and knew how to use them, and biochemists did not and did not care. Alternative hypothesis: PNAS figures are managed by biochemists. Considering the authors are down the hall from Eric Betzig, who won a prize of high resolution microscopy (and has since published two Science papers on more high res microscopy), they could have acquired and published better images. Their centromere, telomere repeats, MUC1 and MUC4 tandem repeat targets were all previously published (and cited by them) with somewhat better image quality.

On 2015 Sep 10, George McNamara commented:

Over at PubPeer (where this will be mirrored to) there were questions as to why I consider the image quality of figures 1 and 2 are so bad. See the Ma et al 2013 paper - also published in PNAS. http://www.pnas.org/content/110/52/21048.figures-only

Was not that hard two years ago to publish high quality images. Nor was it that hard for Deng et al to publish good quality figure 3 or supplemental files.