It's more than just false advertising, it's criminal negligence wasting research attention, research time (repeating experiments to understand whats not working), naive nameplate quotations in the scientific literature also corrupts the scientific record (the author knows they are simply restating the nameplate specifications, but the reader may confuse it as a claim by the author).
Wondering if its sort of OK because it might just be marketing material, think of how the tobacco and other lobbies manipulate the scientific record. I mean technically it is marketing material... if one cynically views the scientific record as a poster wall where the highest bidder is allowed to plaster their spam all over the place.
(links to https://www.thermofisher.com/uk/en/home/life-science/antibod...)
I think it is technically marketing material, but if you have to fabricate your marketing material, that's not a good sign that the material is accurate. If I buy a car based on an advert where it shows the car going at 300 mph, and in real life it maxes out at 30mph, that's misleading advertising and something should be done about it.
Given that "at Thermo Fisher, a single vial containing a 0.1 mL aliquot of antibody solution typically costs 400 to 500 USD", you'd want to have accurate marketing material before buying it
The evidence of painting out the background is likely someone cleaning up other bands, where the antibody has bound to something other than the intended target. So, they are making out the antibody is better than it actually is.
Copy-pasted bands could be evidence of attempting to make a weak band look stronger, or even adding a band where one didn't exist - potentially the entire blot is fabricated.
Either way, like someone else said, this is like fabricating parts of a data sheet.
It doesn't excuse it, but like someone else said, scientists would never just trust an antibody they bought. They'd do their own tests. Labs will also share notes amongst each other, along the lines of "that antibody is bad, and also strongly binds XYZ. You should try this other one instead".
> This image is supposed to demonstrate that the antibody being sold works as intended. (…) Antibodies are near-ubiquitous but notoriously fickle laboratory reagents in biomedical research. For many applications, it is absolutely crucial that the antibodies that you use are selective (i.e., the antibody binds strongly to the target protein) and specific (i.e., the antibody binds to the protein of interest and little else).
Antibodies showing a different picture (Western blot) than what is expected can drastically change the interpretation of the results as well as the conclusion of a study, for example. It may also encourage scientific fraud by authors by forcing them to unknowingly/coincidentally make to a blot image the same (or similar) fraudulent modifications performed by the vendor.
Now I’m curious about how much of the blot photoshopping present in retracted papers can be attributed to these misleading verification data.
Now, if while preparing the images they needed to do some editorial choices (or it is well possible a person in the editorial group was told to 'enhance the images' but wasn't aware of the details) because of limitations in doing the experiment then this is probably not a big deal
Or if more than one blob is present (i.e. blobs at different molecular weights) for a supposedly selective and specific antibody that should show exactly one blob on the blot.
> Now, if while preparing the images they needed to do some editorial choices
Editorial choices on raw scientific data are a big no-no.
I don't think you can find a picture in an article that hasn't been photoshopped in one way or another (which is mostly ok as long as it is not misleading)
Edit: TF's reply is interesting https://www.thermofisher.com/es/es/home/life-science/antibod...
Basically they say they are reviewing the images
(Also journals are usually more rigorous than marketing material)
Still part of the article.
> would be more worried if the blotted area was different (the dark blob) - or if data in a datasheet (something like test specificity, level of detection, etc) was wrong
These images are provided on the datasheet and form the basis for the level of detection / specificity claims
Source: work as a software dev at a company developing antibody drugs
So what this fraud does is convince you to give these antibodies a chance when you otherwise wouldn’t have. You should validate them yourself and show they only bind your target before doing an experiment, but now you’re just wasting time and money evaluating something that’s guaranteed to fail.
Antibodies are notoriously unreliable, so you might have to give two or three vendors a try before you get one that works. Now I’m starting to wonder how much of that reputation is due to fraud and not just nature.
Typically these catalogues have some numbers with regards to the antibodies binding affinity / impurities so you can have a general idea of what to expect, but having a clean image might mislead you into thinking that you did something wrong in your own setup. Seeing how wide spread it is, it's easy to imagine that their own lab is not run very "cleanly" and they have antibody contaminations in their gels, or issues with their own protocol that they're trying to edit out. Doubt that's the case, but it's really not a good look.
When I buy an electronic component as a regular consumer I expect the datasheet "typical" values to be accurate 90% of the time. I can imagine larger industrial customers would really raise a stink if it's worse than that. However, any critical components in my circuit must be verified and "binned", and that's on me.
That is to say, this looks bad for Thermo Fisher. But, that’s as far as the damage should go.
But unless you’re in the field, you won’t realize exactly how big ThermoFisher actually is. They are the major supplier of everything for molecular biology work. From freezers (the Thermo part) to plates and pipettes (Fisher) to enzymes and antibodies. In many ways they are like Amazon. They sell everything. Some of it from outside companies, but a good deal of sales are from in-house brands. They could use their position as a reseller to know which products sell the best and with the highest margins.
In a company of this size, it’s easy to have one group feel pressure and cheat on running the gels to confirm results. Particularly when the real results are ambiguous or dodgy. It’s not a good look, but I doubt it will put a dent in people from buying things (non-antibodies) from them.