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Christopher Korch is adding up the costs of contaminated cell lines.
After a year of intensive data gathering and analysis, he believes he has for the first time begun to quantify the damage done to the scientific enterprise by contaminated cell lines.
Thus, use of contaminated cell lines may cause significant delays in the development of new treatments or new biomarkers.
For decades, misidentified and contaminated cell lines have been a high-profile cause of wasted research effort and funding, and false claims in the literature [ 1– 3].
To minimize the risk to work with misidentified and/or contaminated cell lines, DNA profiling was periodically carried out in-house to authenticate cell cultures.
All media, media components and other reagents used for the contaminated cell lines must be discarded and all other cell lines in use within the laboratory should be quarantined and tested for mycoplasma to detect any spread of contamination.
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To come up with the number, Freedman and economists Iain Cockburn and Timothy Simcoe of Boston University combed the literature for two dozen or so studies that tried to quantify how many biomedical papers are flawed because of specific problems such as a contaminated cell line.
Added to this is concern over the alarming frequency with which cultures have been found retrospectively to be infected with mycoplasma or cross-contaminated with other cell lines (so-called 'false' lines) (Masters, 2000; Drexler et al, 2003).
It is unlikely that these cell lines were cross-contaminated or originated from the same patient, as they were derived in laboratories in different hemispheres, and the cell lines differed in the genetic sequences for other genes, including MC1R and CDK4 (MAD and KS-H, unpublished data) (Landi et al, 2006).
A Pubmed search for U-373 returns 731 results (September 2013), however, by a review of these articles it is clear that it is rarely clarified if the authors have used the true U-373 or the cross-contaminated U-251 cell line.
Total RNA was isolated from mammary-derived cell lines with Trizol reagent (Invitrogen, Carlsbad, CA), and contaminated chromosomal DNA was removed by RNase-free DNase treatment.
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