Quote:If this particular image is your concern, all I can say is "Big deal". The person that created this should not have duplicated virtually pure white areas and pasted it over virtually pure white areas. But, I can see how a person might not realize that overlaying one white area with another white area might be a big No-No and cause someone to consider it to be fraud. For the purposes of science, it shouldn't have been done. It *could* hide something nefarious, but what could possibly be in that column that would invalidate the results?
I don't think you understand what is being shown.
The areas highlighted are supposed to show a negative result, hence why it would look "white" as you describe it. Basically, it's showing there is not a band there, as opposed to the top right (next to "anti-myc").
But the image manipulation here is that all these negative/"white" spaces were copied and then pasted. They don't show distinct separate experimental results. Which image is the copy and which is the original? Are any of them showing a real actual experimental result? We can't know.
Particularly when it comes to blots, this sort of falsification is very easy and thus concerning; you have to trust that the band or blank space without a band actually represents the protein or lack of protein the author tells you it represents.