RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Identification of human gene research articles with wrongly identified nucleotide sequences
JF Life Science Alliance
JO Life Sci. Alliance
FD Life Science Alliance LLC
SP e202101203
DO 10.26508/lsa.202101203
VO 5
IS 4
A1 Yasunori Park
A1 Rachael A West
A1 Pranujan Pathmendra
A1 Bertrand Favier
A1 Thomas Stoeger
A1 Amanda Capes-Davis
A1 Guillaume Cabanac
A1 Cyril Labbé
A1 Jennifer A Byrne
YR 2022
UL https://www.life-science-alliance.org/content/5/4/e202101203.abstract
AB Nucleotide sequence reagents underpin molecular techniques that have been applied across hundreds of thousands of publications. We have previously reported wrongly identified nucleotide sequence reagents in human research publications and described a semi-automated screening tool Seek & Blastn to fact-check their claimed status. We applied Seek & Blastn to screen >11,700 publications across five literature corpora, including all original publications in Gene from 2007 to 2018 and all original open-access publications in Oncology Reports from 2014 to 2018. After manually checking Seek & Blastn outputs for >3,400 human research articles, we identified 712 articles across 78 journals that described at least one wrongly identified nucleotide sequence. Verifying the claimed identities of >13,700 sequences highlighted 1,535 wrongly identified sequences, most of which were claimed targeting reagents for the analysis of 365 human protein-coding genes and 120 non-coding RNAs. The 712 problematic articles have received >17,000 citations, including citations by human clinical trials. Given our estimate that approximately one-quarter of problematic articles may misinform the future development of human therapies, urgent measures are required to address unreliable gene research articles.