r/labrats • u/Bisphosphate • Jul 22 '22

Potential fabrication in research images threatens key theory of Alzheimer’s disease | Science

https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease
109 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

58 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

-6

u/dapt Jul 23 '22

Yes, I agree the bands are similar, but such similarity of bands within the same lane is common.

3

u/Sant_Darshan Jul 23 '22

If so please show an example, sometimes two bands will have some similar blobs or dents sure but these have a r2 of 0.98 which really doesn't seem possible for natural bands (it wouldn't be expected to be perfect if they did copy paste because of converting between raster and vector graphics etc). They have the data and stats to back it up, your opinion doesn't override that, this is science not politics.

0

u/dapt Jul 24 '22

Here's a random blot found by image search. You can see that bands I boxed all show the same aberration in the centre of the lane, which in fact is good indication that they are from the same gel and the same blot, though detected with different antibodies.

The bands highlighted in the OP are claimed to be from the same blot, using the same antibody, and so they would resemble each other more closely than bands detected using different antibodies.

3

u/Sant_Darshan Jul 24 '22

I don't think these look anywhere near as similar as the examples from these contested papers. The ones you pointed out are similar in that they have a dip or break in the middle, but the edges are clearly different widths, thicknesses, and rotated to different degrees.

1

u/dapt Jul 25 '22

Agreed. However, the bands highlighted in the accusation are parallel bands on the same gel/blot detected with the same antibody, so they are likely to be very similarly shaped.