As part of the Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology, we published a Registered Report (Repass et al., 2016), that described how we intended to replicate an experiment from the paper ' infection is prevalent in human colorectal carcinoma' (Castellarin et al., 2012). Here we report the results. When measuring DNA by qPCR in colorectal carcinoma (CRC), adjacent normal tissue, and separate matched control tissue, we did not detect a signal for in most samples: 25% of CRCs, 15% of adjacent normal, and 0% of matched control tissue were positive based on quantitative PCR (qPCR) and confirmed by sequencing of the qPCR products. When only samples with detectable in CRC and adjacent normal tissue were compared, the difference was not statistically significant, while the original study reported a statistically significant increase in expression in CRC compared to adjacent normal tissue (Figure 2; Castellarin et al., 2012). Finally, we report a meta-analysis of the result, which suggests expression is increased in CRC, but is confounded by the inability to detect in most samples. The difference in expression between CRC and adjacent normal tissues was thus smaller than the original study, and not detected in most samples.
