Quote:Exactly so. It is concerning because there may have been "signal" in the lower right area that was pasted over with basically white space from the other green highlighted areas
Too many mistakes in this post to respond to them all but just to start that is not the reason for concern. It's not that there was data in the lower right that was covered up.
What is concerning is that the blots for the 3A figure largely do not seem to be actually shown as they are just copy/pasted areas of who knows what.
The blots to check whether the vector only transfected cells, DCC netrin receptor transfected cells, or myc-tagged (a way of tagging a protein with a different protein to allow detection via an antibody to the myc epitope) UNC5H2 receptor netrin receptor transfected cells produced an antibody reaction with their corresponding antibodies in the western blot.
It's a control experiment that is necessary to demonstrate so we can interpret the rest of the figure, which purports to show what happens when both DCC and UNC5H2 are both expressed at the same time in presence of netrin and whether they form a complex.
To support the conclusions in the rest of the figure, the blots should show no bands, and they don't, but as they were all copy pasted, we know for sure that the experiments the figure purports to show are not actually shown.
It's probable that the experiments would indeed show a negative result. But you have to show your work in science, and rather than do that, in this figure somebody just pasted in the results rather than showing us actual experimental results. Not a concern that someone pasted over contradictory results