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Lab supply companies have been selling antibodies using manipulated images
Image changes that would get a paper retracted are widespread among suppliers.
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.
Antibodies are useful in the lab because the immune system generates them to recognize specific proteins. While those proteins typically appear on the surface of pathogens, the immune system doesn’t know where a given protein it encounters comes from. So, if you inject an animal with your protein of interest, it will typically generate antibodies to recognize that.
That recognition can be incredibly useful. If you prepare cultured cells appropriately, for example, you can use these antibodies to tell you where in the cell the protein is located. Similarly, you can use them to find out which tissues in an organ or embryo make your protein. Finally, you can collect all the proteins from a cell, separate them on a gel, and then see where the protein ends up, telling you whether it’s made, if it’s chemically modified, et cetera.
The companies that sell antibodies use these same experiments to demonstrate that their antibodies work and typically display images from these experiments as a form of marketing. If a researcher wants to do a western blot with this antibody, these images are a sign that it can produce beautiful data.
But Richardson had found that these images often provided an unrealistic picture of whether the antibody was effective. So, he brought in a collaborator, Sholto David, and partially automated tests that could highlight misleading image manipulations in commercial antibody data. He found a lot: About 17,500 antibodies with problematic image changes, coming from 16 different companies. Nearly 7 percent of the images examined showed signs of manipulation. We’ve shown a few choice ones here that we found within the first 25 images we looked at.
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.