Can antibody explain these images?

Back in May, science sleuth Sholto David came across a suspicious image from the major life-sciences supplier Thermo Fisher. It was a Western blot showing the performance of one of their antibodies that is commonly used in cancer research. On the blot, four apparently separate protein bands were copies of the same shape, duplicated and flipped or rotated to produce the others.

Since then, Reese Richardson, a metascience and computational biology researcher and other sleuths uncovered many more by increasing image contrast and searching suppliers’ catalogues for repeated visual fingerprints, partly using image-search tools. According to Nature, they have now found over 18,000 questionable images across 15 commercial suppliers, with digital alterations such as repositioned bands, painted-over regions, and reused background noise. For the last category, Elisabeth Bik (who some say has forensic laser eyes) told Nature, “That particular type of image alteration or manipulation suggests that these antibodies were never tested at all in the lab.” Weirdly, identical images were sometimes used by multiple suppliers, which suggests that they came from the same third-party manufacturers.

The images don’t necessarily mean the antibodies themselves are flawed, but since other research has found that commercial antibodies are commonly unreliable, I wonder whether this is just the tip of the iceberg, and how much of scientists’ time has been wasted chasing false leads. One takeaway is that researchers should avoid relying on suppliers’ images and independently validate their antibodies. But given how time consuming and repetitive it would be for individual scientists to validate them, a wider effort seems worthwhile. For example, the Canadian open-science company YCharOS tests some commercial antibodies head-to-head and publishes their results openly, and the University of Leicester’s ‘Only Good Antibodies’ hosts this data on a searchable database, though neither are comprehensive. The sleuths themselves also host a Zenodo repository with their findings.