Divisions of Medical Oncology and Endocrinology, Metabolism, and Diabetes, University of Colorado School of Medicine, Anschutz Medical Campus, Aurora, CO, USA.
CellBank Australia, Children's Medical Research Institute, The University of Sydney, Westmead, NSW, Australia.
SLAS Discov. 2021 Dec;26(10):1268-1279. doi: 10.1177/24725552211051963. Epub 2021 Oct 26.
Cell lines are essential models for biomedical research. However, they have a common and important problem that needs to be addressed. Cell lines can be misidentified, meaning that they no longer correspond to the donor from whom the cells were first obtained. This problem may arise due to cross-contamination: the accidental introduction of cells from another culture. The contaminant, which is often a rapidly dividing cell line, will overgrow and replace the original culture. The end result is a false cell line, also known as a misidentified or imposter cell line. False cell lines may come from an entirely different species, tissue, or cell type than the original donor. If undetected, false cell lines produce unreliable and irreproducible results that pollute the biomedical literature and threaten the development of reliable drug discovery and meaningful patient treatments.The goal of this study was to ascertain how widespread this problem is and how it affects the literature, as well as to estimate how much funding has been used to produce pools of scientific literature of questionable value. We focus on HEp-2 [HeLa] and Intestine 407 [HeLa], two false cell lines that are widely used in the scientific literature but were shown to be cross-contaminated in 1967. These two cell lines have been used in 8497 and 1397 published articles and extensively described as laryngeal cancer and normal intestine, respectively, rather than their true identity: the cervical cancer cell line HeLa. Discussed are tools, approaches, and resources that can address this issue-both retrospectively and prospectively.
细胞系是生物医学研究的重要模型。然而，它们存在一个共同且重要的问题，需要加以解决。细胞系可能会被错误鉴定，也就是说，它们不再对应最初获得细胞的供体。这个问题可能是由于交叉污染引起的：即细胞偶然从另一个培养物中引入。污染物通常是一种快速分裂的细胞系，它会过度生长并取代原始培养物。最终结果是产生一个虚假的细胞系，也称为错误鉴定或冒名顶替的细胞系。虚假细胞系可能来自与原始供体完全不同的物种、组织或细胞类型。如果未被检测到，虚假细胞系会产生不可靠和不可重复的结果，污染生物医学文献，并威胁到可靠药物发现和有意义的患者治疗的发展。本研究的目的是确定这个问题的普遍程度以及它如何影响文献，以及估计有多少资金用于产生有疑问价值的科学文献库。我们专注于 HEp-2 [HeLa] 和 Intestine 407 [HeLa] 这两个虚假细胞系，它们在科学文献中被广泛使用，但在 1967 年被证明是交叉污染的。这两个细胞系已被用于 8497 篇和 1397 篇已发表的文章中，并被广泛描述为喉癌和正常肠道，而不是它们的真实身份：宫颈癌细胞系 HeLa。讨论了可以解决这个问题的工具、方法和资源，无论是回顾性还是前瞻性。
