Category: misidentified cell lines

Year after year, a husband-and-wife team at a university in Iran has been publishing studies involving research on cell lines ostensibly purchased from the Pasteur Institute of Iran, in Tehran. 

But the couple may never have been in possession of the cells. In correspondence obtained by Retraction Watch, the Pasteur Institute told their employer, Jahrom University of Medical Sciences, only three of the many cell lines described in their publications had been available at the national cell bank over the past decade.

A university official confirmed the two researchers – Fraidoon Kavoosi, an associate professor in the department of anatomical science, and his wife Masumeh Sanaei, an assistant professor in the same department – were under investigation.

Continue reading Exclusive: Cancer researchers in Iran under investigation as questions swirl around dozens of studies

Human cell lines represent key reagents for many research laboratories. Cell lines are often the first models that researchers choose for experiments such as gene manipulation and drug testing, as they are relatively accessible and inexpensive, particularly compared with mouse and other animal models.

However, cell lines also are prone to contamination by other faster growing cell lines. As a result,  many human cell lines purported to represent particular tumor types have been found by genetic testing to be contaminated by other cancer cells. This potential for confusion poses a serious problem for researchers who want to study a particular cancer type but end up using cells from an unrelated disease.

Our team studies wrongly identified nucleotide sequence reagents in cancer research, such as PCR primers and gene knockdown reagents. Recently in the context of an undergraduate student project, we decided to also check the identities of cell lines in a small group of papers on the human gene miR-145, which codes for a microRNA. We found wrongly identified nucleotide sequences and cell lines in numerous articles about miR-145, but also what appeared to be five misspelled identifiers of contaminated cell lines.

Continue reading Misspelled cell lines take on new lives — and why that’s bad for the scientific literature

Anita Bandrowski, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, works on tools to improve the transparency and reproducibility of scientific methods. (Her work on Research Resource Identifiers, or RRIDs, has been previously featured on Retraction Watch.) This week, Bandrowski and colleagues  — including Amanda Capes-Davis, who chairs the International Cell Line Authentication Committee — published a paper in eLife that seeks to determine whether these tools are actually influencing the behavior of scientists, in this case by reducing the number of potentially erroneous cell lines used in published studies.

Such issues may affect thousands of papers. Among more than 300,000 cell line names in more than 150,000 articles, Bandrowski and her colleagues “estimate that 8.6% of these cell lines were on the list of problematic cell lines, whereas only 3.3% of the cell lines in the 634 papers that included RRIDs were on the problematic list,” suggesting “that the use of RRIDs is associated with a lower reported use of problematic cell lines.” 

Retraction Watch spoke with Bandrowski about the role of these tools in the larger movement to improve transparency and reproducibility in science, and whether meta-scientific text-mining approaches will gain traction in the research community.

Retraction Watch (RW): Your study presents RRID as a behavioral “nudge,” beyond its primary goal of standardizing method reporting. What other nudges can you envision to prevent misuse of cell lines in scientific research? Continue reading Can a “nudge” stop researchers from using the wrong cell lines?