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…
Antibodies are vital components of the immune system and widely used in laboratory research. Commercially available antibodies are readily accessible, often delivered to researchers overnight. However, a post-doctoral researcher at Northwestern University, Reese Richardson, discovered manipulated images in lab experiments demonstrating the performance of these antibodies.
The manipulations varied from removing background noise, copying and pasting data to fabricate results, to full-on fabrication. Richardson subsequently conducted a broader search and identified such manipulations in over 17,000 commercial antibody images used for marketing. The implications of this revelation are substantial. Researchers purchasing antibodies with the expectation of generating clear data may instead encounter issues, leading them to waste time and resources troubleshooting the problem.
Consequently, the fault may be wrongly attributed to the researcher's methods. Several antibody-selling companies have responded to the findings with varying levels of concern, ranging from a vague "we'll look into it" to "we don't think there's a problem."
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