![]() This is why it is important to ascertain that exactly same amounts of protein-containing cell lysates are present in each gel lane. It is not a small issue, because the purpose of such gel analysis is to compare the levels of a certain phosphorylated protein among different samples, say control versus various treatment or a the effect of a treatment at different time points. There, a number of Western Blots for a phosphorylated protein seem not to fit the corresponding loading controls provided in the figure. The paper is so fresh, original data must exist to answer the questions. A reader of my site contacted me with some examples of such inappropriate gel presentation in Moriggl papers, some of which he already posted on PubPeer.ĭo the bands of total protein AKT match those of phosphorylated (pAKT) in this Moriggl paper Mueller et al, Diabetes, 2017? It seems they do not, which indicates the two separate gels are presented as one. Such analysis must be always supported by proper gel loading controls, which seems not always be the case here. The Moriggl lab studies molecular signalling in cancer cells and tissues, hence its focus on the analysis of regulatory protein phosphorylation and how it changes under various conditions. Just like it seems to be occasionally the case in the publications from the lab of Richard Moriggl, director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Cancer Research and professor at the Medical University of Vienna, Austria. This is exactly why a certain aberration in Western Blot integrity is often either overlooked or dismissed as incompetent nitpicking: the absence of proper loading controls. You do not need to be an expert in the technology or even a biologist, to find data rigging. Anyone with a minimum of image analysis skills or a good eye for duplications can spot Western Blot manipulations. It is however not the technology to blame for all the rigging done with it, but the simple fact that it is image based. Some even question the technology as such, since it is indeed mostly Western Blots (and other gels, like Northern Blots for RNA or Southern Blots for DNA or RNA PCR-amplification gels) which are flagged for image manipulation. The website PubPeer is flooded with evidence of manipulated Western blots, where gel lanes were inappropriately spliced, or where bands digitally duplicated or erased. Western blot, a method to separate proteins by size and analyse their relative expression levels, is a much maligned technique of molecular cell biology.
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