Hundreds of scientists who study cancer and aging have made an easily avoidable but significant mistake, deploying the wrong antibody to test for a key protein, according to a researcher who exposes errors in the biomedical literature. Instead of antibodies that recognize p16INK4a, a tumor-suppressing protein that may also promote aging, these researchers used antibodies that tag the similarly named protein p16-ARC, which helps shape the cell’s molecular skeleton.
The gaffe appears in more than 300 papers, including some published by top journals such as Nature, Nature Medicine, Cancer Cell, eLife, and Science Advances, reports Sholto David, a molecular biologist at the U.K. biotech OXB and a part-time error hunter. David’s latest revelations, posted on 2 June on the blog For Better Science, have sent researchers digging through old lab notebooks and, in at least one case, back to the lab to rerun experiments.
Original source:
An almost unbelievable blunder has occurred in the field of senescence, hundreds of papers by dozens of labs have presented incorrect data by using the wrong antibody to analyse the critical tumor suppressor and cell cycle regulator usually referred to as “p16”. This mistake has been caused by researchers muddling two proteins with similar names but entirely different sequences and functions. High impact papers with hundreds of citations in Nature , Nature Medicine , Cancer Cell , and eLife have been caught in this mistake. First, a brief background: