Problematic images in vendor antibody verification data (original) (raw)

Published May 28, 2026 | Version 260528

Dataset Open

Authors/Creators

1. Northwestern University

Description

This repository hosts documentation of suspicious, apparently manipulated or otherwise problematic antibody verification data in the catalogs of laboratory reagent vendors. As of 28 May 2026, we have documented 127 problematic images across 119 products in the primary antibody catalog of Thermo Fisher Scientific (see the first example spotted by Sholto David on 17 May 2026). Others can submit potentially problematic images that they have spotted in any vendor's catalog at this Google form.

The spreadsheet catch_all_spreadsheet.xlsx describes all collected instances of problematic images. The archive original_images.zip contains all images as originally downloaded from the vendor's website. The archive annotated_images.zip contains annotations of each image that demonstrate the identified problems. catch_all_spreadsheet.xlsx has the following columns:

image_index: a unique index for each image in the spreadsheet
vendor: the vendor selling the product in question (e.g., "Thermo Fisher Scientific")
catalog_number: the catalog number of the product in question (e.g., "MA5-12557")
product_title: the product title as it appears in the vendor's catalog (e.g., "p53 Monoclonal Antibody (DO-7) - MA5-12557")
product_link: the URL of the product page
original_image_filename: the filename of the original image as it appears in original_images.zip
annotated_image_filename: the filename of the annotated image as it appears in annotated_images.zip
summary: a brief description of the identified issues in the image
identified_by: a description of who originally identified/annotated this image as problematic
first_identified: the date on which the image was identified/anntotated as problematic
external_links: URLs to any social media posts/blogs where the observation was original posted online

Files

annotated_images.zip

Files (33.3 MB)