You are absolutely right, more information describing to what extents these
structures were falsified will be valuable to the community. Actually, it
will be more useful if the investigators can publish their report as an
article in Acta D (as a case study for tracking falsified structures).
I have a suggestion (actually a request) to the expertise in the field to
write a kind of review article about "sources of error in crystallography
and how to hunt these errors". It will be even better if it is written
considering the non-crystallographers (scientists who use the structural
information - like the co-authors on structural papers). This will help to
educate the non-crystallographers how to look at the structures critically.
Ibrahim
--
Ibrahim M. Moustafa, Ph.D.
Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Dept.
201 Althouse Lab., University Park,
Pennsylvania State University
PA 16802
Tel. (814) 863-8703
Fax (814) 865-7927
On 12/11/09 4:19 AM, "Tommi Kajander" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Would the exact analysis of how each of these things were wrong and
> fabricated be somewhere
> available???? Would be fair (apart from the known case of C3b) to have
> the whole analysis available
> instead of just this kind of news feed. I suspect its not obvious by
> five minute check in all cases.
>
> Perhaps there needs to be ways within PDB in form of automated tools
> that would raise those red
> flags in suspicious cases (e.g. some data analysis --such as the
> contribution by solvent etc now that data beyond 8Å
> is by default used in refinement) - as it appears peer review/editing
> by journals isn't/cant always be(?) stringent enough.
>
> In any case, some type of automated analysis of the whole data base
> might be a good idea, as there can be
> other cases (with another couple of thousand papers citing them..).
>
> tommi
>
> On Dec 10, 2009, at 4:16 PM, Ibrahim Moustafa wrote:
>
>> "After a thorough examination of the available data, which included a
>> re-analysis of each structure alleged to have been fabricated, the
>> committee
>> found a preponderance of evidence that structures 1BEF, 1CMW,
>> 1DF9/2QID,
>> 1G40, 1G44, 1L6L, 2OU1, 1RID, 1Y8E, 2A01, and 2HR0 were more likely
>> than not
>> falsified and/or fabricated and recommended that they be removed
>> from the
>> public record," the university said in its statement this week."
>
>
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