Incidences of problematic cell lines are lower in papers that use RRIDs to identify cell lines
Zeljana Babic,
Amanda Capes-Davis,
Maryann E Martone,
Amos Bairoch,
I Burak Ozyurt,
Thomas H Gillespie,
Anita E Bandrowski
Affiliations
Zeljana Babic
Center for Research in Biological Systems, University of California, San Diego, San Diego, United States
Amanda Capes-Davis
Children's Medical Research Institute, University of Sydney, Westmead, Australia
Maryann E Martone
Department of Neuroscience, University of California, San Diego, United States; SciCrunch Inc, San Diego, United States
Amos Bairoch
Computer and Laboratory Investigation of Proteins of Human Origin, Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Geneva, Switzerland; Department of Microbiology and Molecular Medicine, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
I Burak Ozyurt
Center for Research in Biological Systems, University of California, San Diego, San Diego, United States
The use of misidentified and contaminated cell lines continues to be a problem in biomedical research. Research Resource Identifiers (RRIDs) should reduce the prevalence of misidentified and contaminated cell lines in the literature by alerting researchers to cell lines that are on the list of problematic cell lines, which is maintained by the International Cell Line Authentication Committee (ICLAC) and the Cellosaurus database. To test this assertion, we text-mined the methods sections of about two million papers in PubMed Central, identifying 305,161 unique cell-line names in 150,459 articles. We estimate that 8.6% of these cell lines were on the list of problematic cell lines, whereas only 3.3% of the cell lines in the 634 papers that included RRIDs were on the problematic list. This suggests that the use of RRIDs is associated with a lower reported use of problematic cell lines.
