Chemists Start Web Site Fingering Substances That Ruin Experiments

A band of more than 50 scientists has created a  to help biologists avoid poor-quality chemical reagents that undermine experiments in molecular biology and drug discovery.

“Shitty reagents generate shitty science. They waste money and waste careers,” says biochemist Aled Edwards, head of the Structural Genomics Consortium, a public–private partnership to study proteins important to drug-discovery efforts. Although the literature is rife with reports about the flaws of individual chemical tools, scientists continue to use them, he says. “The current way of doing things can't fix it. There is a systems failure in how we communicate information about molecules.”

The , which Edwards and dozens of co-authors describe in a commentary published in on July 21, is an attempt to create a community tool to improve the situation.

Chemical probes are small molecules designed to bind to a specific protein and disrupt its function. They are valuable tools for biologists trying to find out what a particular protein does in a cell, or for drug-discoverers gauging whether interfering with a function could form the basis of a therapy. But probes often interfere with unintended proteins, and their reliability can vary by cell type and by species. That can lead scientists who rely on such probes to make—and publish—unwarranted conclusions.

Grand failures

The new portal will recommend probes for use with particular proteins as well as specify recommended experimental systems and concentrations at which to use the reagents. “Our contribution is going to be sorting through the chaff and saying ‘here's the wheat,’” says Edwards.

“I do think a database will be a helpful tool,” says Kip Guy, a chemical biologist at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. Finding appropriate information in the scientific literature is onerous, he says. He anticipates using the portal both for designing his own experiments, as well as when reviewing grants and scientific papers.

At the moment the portal is populated with entries for a mere seven probes, notes William Zuercher, a chemical biologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a co-author on the commentary. The portal has £50,000 (US$78,000) of seed funding from the London-based biomedical charity the Wellcome Trust, and a small group of the co-authors have pledged to curate and enter data on probes. The team hopes to hire someone to lead the project in the next few weeks. The success of the portal will depend on experts turning their frustration with inconclusive work into action, says Zuercher. “To make the resource sustainable, we will need community input.”

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