I've always wondered about gel image fraud -- what's stopping fraudulent researchers from just running a dummy gel for each fake figure? If you just loaded some protein with a similar MW / migration / concentration as the one you're trying to spoof, the bands would look more or less indistinguishable. And because it's a real unique band (just with the wrong protein), you wouldn't be able to tell it's been faked using visual inspection.
Perhaps this is already happening, and we just don't know it... In this way I've always thought gel images were more susceptible to fraud vs. other commonly faked images (NMR / MS spectra etc, which are harder to spoof)
For reference, the title of the paper this appeared in is "Novel RNA- and FMRP-binding protein TRF2-S regulates axonal mRNA transport and presynaptic plasticity"
owlninja ·19 days ago
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5mk ·19 days ago
Perhaps this is already happening, and we just don't know it... In this way I've always thought gel images were more susceptible to fraud vs. other commonly faked images (NMR / MS spectra etc, which are harder to spoof)
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smusamashah ·19 days ago
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlXXK20HE_dV8rBa2h-8P9d-0...
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snowwrestler ·19 days ago
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mrshu ·19 days ago
Google Scholar reports 43 citations: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Novel+RNA-and+FMRP-bind...
The images still seem to be visible in both PubMed and Nature versions.
PubMed version: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26586091/
Nature version: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms9888
Nature version (PDF): https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms9888.pdf