> "This image is supposed to demonstrate that the antibody being sold works as intended. It is labeled as “Advanced Verification” data on Thermo Fisher’s site"
(links to https://www.thermofisher.com/uk/en/home/life-science/antibod...)
I think it is technically marketing material, but if you have to fabricate your marketing material, that's not a good sign that the material is accurate. If I buy a car based on an advert where it shows the car going at 300 mph, and in real life it maxes out at 30mph, that's misleading advertising and something should be done about it.
Given that "at Thermo Fisher, a single vial containing a 0.1 mL aliquot of antibody solution typically costs 400 to 500 USD", you'd want to have accurate marketing material before buying it
It definitely isn't a good look but I'm not entirely sure where this lands on "the line drawing on my IKEA instruction manual doesn't look like the furniture" to "VW diesel emissions report" spectrum. I'd appreciate if any bioscientists in the audience could clear that up a bit.
Images like this show how specifically the antibody binds to the antigen. Generally, the ideal is to have very specific binding. As such, this type of image (Western blot) would only have single bands in any vertical lane. Any other bands show that the antibody is binding to other molecules.
The evidence of painting out the background is likely someone cleaning up other bands, where the antibody has bound to something other than the intended target. So, they are making out the antibody is better than it actually is.
Copy-pasted bands could be evidence of attempting to make a weak band look stronger, or even adding a band where one didn't exist - potentially the entire blot is fabricated.
Either way, like someone else said, this is like fabricating parts of a data sheet.
It doesn't excuse it, but like someone else said, scientists would never just trust an antibody they bought. They'd do their own tests. Labs will also share notes amongst each other, along the lines of "that antibody is bad, and also strongly binds XYZ. You should try this other one instead".
(forgot to say I'm a former post-doc in Cell Biology)
The closest we all will ever get to getting meta meta answers on HN.
From the article:
> This image is supposed to demonstrate that the antibody being sold works as intended. (…) Antibodies are near-ubiquitous but notoriously fickle laboratory reagents in biomedical research. For many applications, it is absolutely crucial that the antibodies that you use are selective (i.e., the antibody binds strongly to the target protein) and specific (i.e., the antibody binds to the protein of interest and little else).
Antibodies showing a different picture (Western blot) than what is expected can drastically change the interpretation of the results as well as the conclusion of a study, for example. It may also encourage scientific fraud by authors by forcing them to unknowingly/coincidentally make to a blot image the same (or similar) fraudulent modifications performed by the vendor.
Now I’m curious about how much of the blot photoshopping present in retracted papers can be attributed to these misleading verification data.
I would be more worried if the blotted area was different (the dark blob) - or if data in a datasheet (something like test specificity, level of detection, etc) was wrong
Now, if while preparing the images they needed to do some editorial choices (or it is well possible a person in the editorial group was told to 'enhance the images' but wasn't aware of the details) because of limitations in doing the experiment then this is probably not a big deal
> I would be more worried if the blotted area was different (the dark blob)
Or if more than one blob is present (i.e. blobs at different molecular weights) for a supposedly selective and specific antibody that should show exactly one blob on the blot.
> Now, if while preparing the images they needed to do some editorial choices
Editorial choices on raw scientific data are a big no-no.
> Editorial choices on raw scientific data are a big no-no.
I don't think you can find a picture in an article that hasn't been photoshopped in one way or another (which is mostly ok as long as it is not misleading)
Edit: TF's reply is interesting https://www.thermofisher.com/es/es/home/life-science/antibod...
Basically they say they are reviewing the images
Usually, journals require raw, unmodified data to be deposited as supplementary information.
Yes, as supplementary information
(Also journals are usually more rigorous than marketing material)
> Yes, as supplementary information
Still part of the article.
Do you work in biology?
> would be more worried if the blotted area was different (the dark blob) - or if data in a datasheet (something like test specificity, level of detection, etc) was wrong
These images are provided on the datasheet and form the basis for the level of detection / specificity claims
It is obvious that they edited the images to make blobs look shorter vertically. And in some cases, simply copy-pasted non-existing blobs.
This is 'used car salesman' levels of fraud on that scale. People rapidly acknowledge these antibodies work or they don't. There are websites with reviews of them. However in addition to getting ripped off for a few hundred bucks, these antibodies are generally produced by immunizing animals and by faking this data they are unnecessarily increasing the discomfort to these animals for a fraudulent reason. Look up the Santa Cruz antibody scandal for more of that.
Antibodies on this scale are not _produced_ by animals. The way these things work is an antibody that binds to a specific target will be _discovered_ by immunizing animals and then screening it's blood or lymph nodes for antibodies of interest. Once an antibody is found and commercialized, it is produced in large bioreactors of cell cultures engineered to produce large amounts of a particular protein (in this case the antibody).
Source: work as a software dev at a company developing antibody drugs
Monoclonal antibodies can't be produced by animals.