[noodlesUK]

Exactly what is the "data" that's being shown here? Is it essentially some kind of marketing material showing "this sort of thing is what you should expect to see" or is it actually data or for compliance? If it's essentially marketing material or an instructional example that isn't meant to be representative it being magically clearer than real life doesn't seem like a great sin (unless it's being claimed it is representative). If it's something to be relied upon for compliance or as data to be used, that's pretty damming.

[DoctorOetker]

It is intentional fabrication: it requires a lot more brain cycles to surreptitiously produce false data, it would literally be less work to Prepare the Western blots and scan them. Its the stuff they sell, so they have ready access to the products and would be much easier and cost-effective to simply perform (if it worked). Only if the product is known not to perform as specified is there a profit incentive for fabricating such "evidence".

It's more than just false advertising, it's criminal negligence wasting research attention, research time (repeating experiments to understand whats not working), naive nameplate quotations in the scientific literature also corrupts the scientific record (the author knows they are simply restating the nameplate specifications, but the reader may confuse it as a claim by the author).

Wondering if its sort of OK because it might just be marketing material, think of how the tobacco and other lobbies manipulate the scientific record. I mean technically it is marketing material... if one cynically views the scientific record as a poster wall where the highest bidder is allowed to plaster their spam all over the place.

[voidUpdate]

> "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

[noodlesUK]

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.

[JR1427]

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".

[JR1427]

(forgot to say I'm a former post-doc in Cell Biology)

[warumdarum]

The closest we all will ever get to getting meta meta answers on HN.

[flobosg]

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.

[raverbashing]

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

[flobosg]

> 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.

[raverbashing]

> 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

[bonsai_spool]

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

[codedokode]

It is obvious that they edited the images to make blobs look shorter vertically. And in some cases, simply copy-pasted non-existing blobs.

[jhart99]

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.

[M95D]

Monoclonal antibodies can't be produced by animals.

[morvita]

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

[xyzzy99]

It's worse than this -- it's often very difficult (expensive, time consuming, etc) to generate the sample being run on the gel, the impact of using a bad or misrepresented antibody are significantly higher than the cost of the antibodies alone.

[jryb]

When you’re deciding which antibodies to buy you’ll look at these figures to get a sense of their quality. Antibodies aren’t perfect and might bind proteins unrelated to the one you want to study. Depending on your application, some off-target binding might be acceptable, but usually it’s not. Also, they might just be completely nonfunctional and bind nothing (perhaps due to missteps during manufacturing).

So what this fraud does is convince you to give these antibodies a chance when you otherwise wouldn’t have. You should validate them yourself and show they only bind your target before doing an experiment, but now you’re just wasting time and money evaluating something that’s guaranteed to fail.

Antibodies are notoriously unreliable, so you might have to give two or three vendors a try before you get one that works. Now I’m starting to wonder how much of that reputation is due to fraud and not just nature.

[persedes]

Doing a western blot right takes a bit of practice and there are a couple failure modes you need to watch out for. Stuff like background "noise", smears, drifts can make it hard to get binary decision out of your experiment. E.g. antibodies are usually very very specific, but they can have impurities, unspecific bindings to other proteins etc which make interpretation harder. If they remove these from the advertised images you'll have a hard time comparing your own results to them. ESPECIALLY if they remove whole bands from the gel picture, which imho should be very much verboten.

Typically these catalogues have some numbers with regards to the antibodies binding affinity / impurities so you can have a general idea of what to expect, but having a clean image might mislead you into thinking that you did something wrong in your own setup. Seeing how wide spread it is, it's easy to imagine that their own lab is not run very "cleanly" and they have antibody contaminations in their gels, or issues with their own protocol that they're trying to edit out. Doubt that's the case, but it's really not a good look.

[eig]

I'd treat this about the same as datasheets for mechanical or electrical parts.

When I buy an electronic component as a regular consumer I expect the datasheet "typical" values to be accurate 90% of the time. I can imagine larger industrial customers would really raise a stink if it's worse than that. However, any critical components in my circuit must be verified and "binned", and that's on me.

[swader999]

Would it be the same idea as an x ray of a critically welded part?

[mbreese]

This is the thing. Yes, the marketing material is bad. But, no one in lab trusts an antibody just because of where you bought it. A new antibody always gets tested and validated before use.

That is to say, this looks bad for Thermo Fisher. But, that’s as far as the damage should go.

[H8crilA]

Why would you even generate fake pictures of this type? Don't you already have real ones? I mean, it's actually more work, unless you don't have the real ones.

[mbreese]

I’m not going to defend Fisher here. It was a stupid thing for someone to do.

But unless you’re in the field, you won’t realize exactly how big ThermoFisher actually is. They are the major supplier of everything for molecular biology work. From freezers (the Thermo part) to plates and pipettes (Fisher) to enzymes and antibodies. In many ways they are like Amazon. They sell everything. Some of it from outside companies, but a good deal of sales are from in-house brands. They could use their position as a reseller to know which products sell the best and with the highest margins.

In a company of this size, it’s easy to have one group feel pressure and cheat on running the gels to confirm results. Particularly when the real results are ambiguous or dodgy. It’s not a good look, but I doubt it will put a dent in people from buying things (non-antibodies) from them.