To reassure potential buyers, companies that sell research antibodies often provide validation images in their catalogs that supposedly confirm their products work as advertised. But nearly 19,000 of the images from 15 companies have been doctored or fabricated, according to a new analysis from Reese Richardson of Northwestern University. This number represents a huge increase from the 450 manipulated images from two companies unveiled by the same researcher earlier this year.

Richardson’s investigations don’t reveal anything about whether the antibodies actually do their intended jobs, cautions University of British Columbia neuroscientist Philip Barker, who helps run experiments for the nonprofit YCharOS, which tests the performance of commercially available antibodies.

More than 300 companies now sell between 3.5 million and 4.8 million types of research antibodies, which are staple tools for tagging and tracking proteins in neuroscience, cell biology, molecular biology, and other fields. But scientists have been fretting about the poor performance of some antibodies for more than a decade.
 

Source https://www.science.org/content/article/fraudulent-images-are-rife-antibody-sellers-websites-researcher-says

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