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Targeted Next-generation Sequencing and Bioinformatics Pipeline to Evaluate Genetic Determinants of Constitutional Disease
Published on: April 4, 2018
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Identification of human gene research articles with wrongly identified nucleotide sequences
Yasunori Park1, Rachael A West1,2, Pranujan Pathmendra1
1Faculty of Medicine and Health, The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia.
Life Science Alliance
|January 13, 2022
Summary
Many scientific publications contain wrongly identified nucleotide sequence reagents, potentially impacting human therapy development. A screening tool identified over 1,500 incorrect sequences in thousands of research articles, necessitating urgent corrections.
Area of Science:
- Molecular Biology
- Genetics
- Biotechnology
Background:
- Nucleotide sequence reagents are fundamental to molecular biology research, appearing in numerous scientific publications.
- Previous work identified wrongly identified nucleotide sequence reagents in human research.
- A semi-automated screening tool, Seek & Blastn, was developed to verify reagent identities.
Purpose of the Study:
- To systematically screen a large corpus of scientific literature for wrongly identified nucleotide sequence reagents.
- To quantify the prevalence of such errors and assess their potential impact on research, particularly in human health.
Main Methods:
- Applied the Seek & Blastn tool to screen over 11,700 publications from diverse literature corpora.
- Included publications from *Gene* (2007-2018) and open-access publications from *Oncology Reports* (2014-2018).
- Manually verified outputs for over 3,400 human research articles.
Main Results:
- Identified 712 articles across 78 journals with at least one wrongly identified nucleotide sequence reagent.
- Verified over 13,700 sequences, finding 1,535 to be wrongly identified.
- The majority of misidentified sequences targeted reagents for human protein-coding genes and non-coding RNAs.
Conclusions:
- A significant number of research articles contain errors in nucleotide sequence reagent identification.
- These 712 problematic articles have garnered over 17,000 citations, including those by human clinical trials.
- Urgent measures are needed to address unreliable gene research articles to prevent misinforming the development of human therapies.
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