Lab supply companies have been selling antibodies using manipulated images

实验室用品公司一直在使用被篡改的图像销售抗体

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.

抗体在人体的免疫防御中起着核心作用。但它们在生物学研究中也几乎无处不在，是几种广泛使用的实验室技术的关键。虽然一些研究人员需要自行生产抗体，但针对许多关键蛋白质的抗体在市场上均有销售，且可以下单实现隔夜送达。

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.

然而，今年 5 月，西北大学的博士后 Reese Richardson 发现，一些用于展示这些抗体在实验室实验中表现的图像遭到了篡改——如果这些篡改出现在学术文献中，足以导致论文被撤稿。这些篡改手段包括去除背景噪声，以及通过复制粘贴数据来伪造结果。目前，他进行了更详尽的搜索，发现用于营销 17,000 多种商业抗体的图像中存在此类问题篡改。

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.

抗体在实验室中之所以有用，是因为免疫系统会产生它们来识别特定的蛋白质。虽然这些蛋白质通常出现在病原体表面，但免疫系统并不知道它所遇到的特定蛋白质来自何处。因此，如果你将目标蛋白质注射到动物体内，它通常会产生识别该蛋白质的抗体。这种识别能力极其有用。

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.

例如，如果你适当地制备培养细胞，就可以利用这些抗体来确定蛋白质在细胞中的位置。同样，你也可以利用它们来找出器官或胚胎中的哪些组织合成了你的蛋白质。最后，你可以收集细胞中的所有蛋白质，通过凝胶电泳进行分离，观察蛋白质的最终位置，从而判断它是否被合成、是否经过化学修饰等。

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.

销售抗体的公司利用同样的实验来证明其抗体的有效性，并通常将这些实验图像作为一种营销手段进行展示。如果研究人员想用这种抗体进行蛋白质印迹（Western blot）实验，这些图像就是该抗体能产生理想数据的标志。但 Richardson 发现，这些图像往往对抗体的有效性提供了不切实际的描述。

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.

因此，他邀请了合作者 Sholto David，并利用部分自动化测试来识别商业抗体数据中具有误导性的图像篡改。他发现了大量问题：来自 16 家不同公司的约 17,500 种抗体存在图像篡改问题。在检查的图像中，近 7% 显示出篡改迹象。

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.

这一发现的后果相当严重。如果你购买抗体时认为它能产生干净、清晰的数据，结果却发现并非如此，许多研究人员会认为问题出在自己身上。这往往导致他们花费时间排查实验流程，并尝试略微不同的条件以获取有效数据。如果抗体本身无法产生预期的结果，那么所有的排查工作都将是时间和金钱的浪费。

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.

《自然》杂志对这一新发现的报道中引用了几家销售此类抗体的公司的回应，概括来说，从“我们会调查此事”到“我们认为这不是问题”不等。而那些曾因抗体实验失败而感到沮丧的研究人员，可能对此有不同的看法。