Lab Supply Companies Have Been Selling Antibodies Using Manipulated Images

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Antibodies play a central role in your body's immune defense. But they're also nearly ubiquitous in biological research, being essential for several widely used lab techniques. While some researchers need to go through the process of producing their own antibodies, antibodies to many key proteins are commercially available and can be ordered for overnight delivery. In May, however, Reese Richardson, a post-doc at Northwestern University, discovered that some of the images used to demonstrate how these antibodies performed in lab experiments had been subject to image manipulation -- the sorts of changes that would get a paper retracted if they had appeared in the academic literature. The manipulations ranged from removing background noise to copying and pasting data to fabricate results. Now, he has done a more exhaustive search and found problematic manipulations in images used to market over 17,000 commercial antibodies.

[...] The consequences of this discovery are pretty significant. If you buy an antibody believing it will generate clean, clear data and find it doesn't, many researchers will assume the problem is them. That often leads them to spend time troubleshooting the procedure and trying slightly different conditions to get useful data. If the antibody can't produce those results, all the troubleshooting will have been a waste of time and money. Nature's coverage of the new findings includes quotes from several companies that sell these antibodies that, paraphrased, range from "we'll look into it" to "we don't think it's a problem." Researchers who have spent time frustrated while failing to get an antibody-based experiment to work may think otherwise.

No way!

[Krishnoid]

I'm shocked that this could happen in academic papers, particularly when it comes to visualizing antibodies [scienceint...digest.com]. At least I think that's what the diagram is supposed to pretend to represent.

Re:

[dgatwood]

Is that a rubber duck and a doughnut?

antibody research

[phantomfive]

Antibodies are used in research because they can be trained to connect to almost anything small. Once they attach in the body or in a petri dish, you can use western blotting or florescence or other techniques to find the antibodies, and you've found what they attached to.

There are a number of other uses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

Re:

[Woeful Countenance]

Yes, correct, as Google AI puts it: "They lock onto a unique site—called an epitope—on a specific antigen (like a virus protein, hormone, or cancer marker) with high accuracy. ... These antibodies are tagged with a label, such as a color-changing enzyme, fluorescent dye, or gold nanoparticle, which shows a visible or measurable result when the target is present."

Trivia: If the generic name of a medication ends in -mab (the above Wikipedia article has a list), the medication is a monoclonal anti

Re:

[gtall]

I preferred to think of Star Trek as going out to research sexy new alien females so we could imagine what we'd to with them and they with us.

Re:

[ceoyoyo]

"unique site"

Antibodies have varying specificity and none is really 100%. It differs between manufacturers too, which is why you should always test them yourself.

Re:

[PPH]

If there are 12 ships in the fleet, how is it that the Enterprise keeps encountering new disasters no one has ever heard of before?

Space, is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.

Reese Richardson

[Woeful Countenance]

Is he the son of famous Marvel scientist Reed Richards [wikipedia.org]?

Re:

[martin-boundary]

With a name like that he may as well have an uncle named Victor!

Criminal

[Retired Chemist]

This seems like a basic case of product misrepresentation and false advertising to me.

Re:

[Monkey-Man2000]

Yes, I work in science, with antibodies and fluorescent imaging among other things, and I assume product literature is shooped to high heaven when it comes to pretty pictures. This newb apparently has too much time on their hands and/or is just jumping on the outrage culture bandwagon (for self-promotion?).

Re: Criminal

[drinkypoo]

It's good to be outraged by fraud.

Greed at work

[gweihir]

As there is the US, there may be fines for the companies, but nobody is sent to prison or fined personally. They will just price that in and continue to lie to their customers.