Mike Rossner had never seen anything like it. At first, the anonymous comment on PubPeer, which claimed a lane of a western blot in a research paper had been duplicated, seemed nothing out of the ordinary to Rossner, who specializes in detecting image manipulation in biomedical research. The surprise came when he looked closer at the magnified images the commenter had provided to support their allegation.

Rossner searched for other posts by the same person, who had commented under the pseudonym Ecionemia acervus. He found several. In two of them, the commenter again appeared to have fabricated the supporting evidence, as Rossner described in a short report detailing his analysis. All of the allegations Rossner traced to the anonymous commenter were directed toward papers by either Byung-Hyun Park, a professor at Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology in Daejeon, South Korea, or Han-Jung Chae, a professor and dean at Jeonbuk National University in Jeonju, where Park worked until 2023.

Source https://retractionwatch.com/2026/01/23/fabricated-allegations-of-image-manipulation-baffle-expert/

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