Companies use western blots in their catalogues to provide confirmation that their antibodies work as they are supposed to. Credit: Manjurul/Getty
Thousands of antibodies sold by multiple research vendors have images associated with their catalogue entries that seem to have been digitally altered, according to a scientific-integrity specialist.
The finding comes after more than 100 problematic images were found by science sleuths in the antibody catalogue of supply company Thermo Fisher Scientific in May. Although image alteration does not mean an underlying product is defective, the trove of flagged images raises questions about the practices of commercial antibody suppliers as the scientific community grapples with concerns about the reliability of these workhorse diagnostic molecules.
Science sleuths uncover more than 100 suspicious images in Thermo Fisher antibody catalogue
The latest search for problematic images in vendor catalogues was undertaken by Reese Richardson, a metascientist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who also led the inquiry in May. On 25 August, he reported that he had found more than 18,000 further questionable images associated with antibodies sold by 15 companies, and released a database of them. Many of the ‘validation images’, which are included in catalogue entries to confirm antibodies’ quality, show signs of extensive editing, according to Richardson.
Antibodies are Y-shaped biomolecules that can bind to specific proteins, making them crucial diagnostic tools in the laboratory. However, their reliability has been a persistent problem; a 2023 study1 examining 614 commercial antibodies showed that more than 50% of them did not work as advertised. The annual cost of ineffective antibodies is estimated to be more than US$1 billion.
Researchers who work on improving antibody reliability are frustrated by the news from Richardson. “It’s disappointing, but it doesn’t surprise me that much because I’ve been burned so many times buying commercial antibodies that don’t work,” says Simona Colantonio, director of the Antibody Characterization Laboratory at the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research in Maryland.
Most of the vendors in Richardson’s database are each associated with a few hundred potentially problematic images. But four are tied to thousands of flagged validation images: G-Biosciences in St. Louis, Missouri, is linked with 6,388 images; Thermo Fisher in Waltham, Massachusetts, with 5,580; LSBio in Newark, California, with 2,695; and Origene, in Rockville, Maryland, with 2,236.
A spokesperson for Thermo Fisher said in a statement that an ongoing review of the firm’s products had so far found “no evidence of impact to antibody performance or the underlying scientific data” and that the company remains “confident in the quality of the products within our antibody catalog”. A spokesperson for LSBio said in a statement that the entries “amount to less than 0.04% of the total offering on our platform”, but that the firm takes the image concerns seriously and will perform an investigation with its partners. G-Biosciences and Origene did not respond to a request for comment.
The sheer number of questionable images flagged by Richardson has alarmed researchers. “What we’re actually looking at is a system-wide problem that requires a system-wide solution,” says pulmonologist Harvinder Virk, co-founder of Only Good Antibodies in Leicester, UK, an open-science effort to characterize and validate commercially sold antibodies.
Cataloguing issues
Researchers looking to purchase antibodies, much like other online shoppers, sift through lengthy catalogues before making their choice; some vendors offer hundreds of thousands of antibodies. Companies typically include image data such as western blots, in which a specific protein in a mixture is ‘labelled’ by a given antibody. Antibodies that perform well leave a distinct band in a blot, and those that perform poorly, by failing to bind to their specific target, can have multiple fuzzy bands. These images are “really one of the few things you have to go on” when determining whether an antibody is worth purchasing, says Sholto David, a molecular biologist in Oxford, UK, who specializes in research-integrity issues.
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When David and Richardson identified more than 100 suspect images in the catalogue of Thermo Fisher in May, the firm responded publicly by saying that it “fully stands by the data and underlying science” but noted that image data might have been “edited, optimized or otherwise adjusted” for presentation.
To investigate further, Richardson scanned the catalogue of Thermo Fisher more thoroughly and looked at those of other companies. He wrote a program to automatically raise and lower the black and white levels in more than 270,000 images, to increase the contrast and reveal any alterations. Then, he manually checked each one.
The 18,000-plus images Richardson has now flagged have not all been double-checked by independent parties, but the handful of fellow sleuths and researchers who Nature asked to examine a dossier of Richardson’s findings say that his method seems sound. “Some of them are really outrageous because you don’t even need to increase the contrast to see that there is some manipulation,” Colantonio says. “The sad part is some of the antibodies are actually probably very good” and these alterations could place doubt on their performance, she adds.
Apparent alterations
One of the most common issues Richardson found was an identical background used across many images. Image backgrounds are normally random, like television static. But Richardson found that some 13,800 images had one of seven shared backgrounds; in many cases, the same background was used by multiple vendors. “That particular type of image alteration or manipulation suggests that these antibodies were never tested at all in the lab,” says Elisabeth Bik, a world-leading specialist in image integrity in San Francisco, California.
