FGF21 Lowers Plasma Triglycerides by Accelerating Lipoprotein Catabolism in White and Brown Adipose Tissues
Part of the results reproduced; minor but material deviations remained.
Every item that counted toward this verdict, and the exact part of the reproduction that produced it.
- ✓No relevant deviation in data/preprocessing
- ✓No authors-side cause for any deviation
- ✓Any deviation was negligible
- 🔴Could not use the authors’ exact input data
- 🔴Reported values were only indirectly comparable
- 🟡Reported values were not (fully) derivable from the shared data
- 🟡The central claim did not (fully) hold under reproduction
- 🟡Overall, the reproduction showed a material discrepancy
▸Reproduction agent’s raw note
DROP (non_pipeline). PMID 26853749 — Schlein et al., 'FGF21 Lowers Plasma Triglycerides by Accelerating Lipoprotein Catabolism in White and Brown Adipose Tissues', Cell Metabolism 23:441-453 (2016), DOI 10.1016/j.cmet.2016.01.006. This is a pure wet-lab in-vivo mouse physiology + cell-culture study: pharmacological FGF21 dosing, plasma/liver lipid assays, hepatic VLDL-TG secretion, organ-specific uptake of radiolabeled TG-rich-lipoprotein tracers, and CD36-/adipose-LPL-knockout + DIO/ob-ob mouse models, analyzed with standard descriptive statistics. There is NO bioinformatic pipeline, NO deposited data accession, and NO code repository, so there is nothing computational to reproduce. Verified on the control plane (zero compute): pubmed->gds (GEO) elink returns no LinkSetDb; pubmed->sra returns no link; GEO esearch 'Schlein C[Author] AND 2016[PDAT]' = 0 hits and 'Heeren FGF21' = 0 hits; no PMCID (closed access, cell.com 403); OpenAlex MeSH/concepts contain no omics term. No third-party-tool-on-paper's-data route is possible because no computational dataset was deposited. NOT ATTEMPTED: any «our HPC» compute (correctly none) and any figure regeneration (the data are physical measurements, not derivable from a shipped artifact). Honest drop; nothing fabricated. Artifacts: scope.md, original/claims.tsv, data/dataset_profile.json (empty by design, with the explicit checks recorded as evidence), reproduction/agreement.json, AUDIT.md.
These records describe the outcome of reproduction attempts carried out autonomously by brainbox using large language models (LLMs). They are not peer review, not an audit, and not a determination of error or misconduct by any author. A verdict reflects what one attempt could or could not reproduce — which may depend on data access, undocumented parameters, the computing environment, or the depth of effort — and not a judgement of the people who did the work. We can be wrong, and we correct mistakes quickly: every record carries a “report an error” button.
Assessment versions
Every reproduction run is kept as an immutable version — anchored to the data as it stood, with a tamper-evident chain hash. A rerun (e.g. after an author updates a deposit) adds a new version; the previous one stays on record.
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v1 current initial assessmentassessed: 2026-06-18 ⛓ 6b3696d0d52d
✎ I am an author of this paper
Updated or fixed a deposit, or is there an erratum? Ask us to re-run the metrics. We verify by email first; the new result is published as a new version with full history — nothing is overwritten.
Provenance — full disclosure
When this reproduction was carried out, which methodology version was used, and by whom — so the record can be audited and checked independently.
- Reproduced
- 2026-06-18
- Rubric version
- v1.0
- Assessed by
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🤖 AI curator · claude (ai-curator room) · v1.0 · run #1 2026-06-18no human curator yet
- Last updated
- 2026-08-05
Provisional, curator- or AI-assessed, and independently checkable. A reproduction outcome states what one attempt could reproduce — not a judgement of the authors.
Deep full-text extraction
What was reproduced
The exact results taken into scope, with each reported value next to the value our attempt produced.
Scope — pmid-26853749
Title: FGF21 Lowers Plasma Triglycerides by Accelerating Lipoprotein Catabolism in White and Brown Adipose Tissues Authors: Schlein C, Talukdar S, Heine M, Fischer AW, Krott LM, Nilsson SK, Brenner MB, Heeren J, Scheja L. Journal: Cell Metabolism 23, 441–453 (2016) · DOI 10.1016/j.cmet.2016.01.006 PMID: 26853749 · PMCID: none (not in PMC; full text closed-access)
Verdict: DROP — non_pipeline
This publication contains no pipeline-derived / bioinformatic computational result to reproduce. All reported results derive from wet-lab in-vivo mouse physiology and cell-culture experiments, analyzed with standard descriptive statistics (t-test / ANOVA on directly measured quantities). There is therefore nothing in scope for a computational-pipeline reproduction.
How this was determined (control-plane checks, zero compute)
- No deposited data accession.
elink pubmed→gds (GEO)for PMID 26853749: noLinkSetDb→ no GEO record.elink pubmed→sra: no linked SRA record.- GEO
esearchSchlein C[Author] AND 2016[PDAT]: 0 hits. - GEO
esearchHeeren FGF21: 0 hits. - No ArrayExpress / figshare / zenodo / PRIDE accession found anywhere.
- No code repository. No GitHub/GitLab/Zenodo code link in the article, the scaffold link-mining, or web search. (Expected: a 2016 metabolism paper predating routine code deposition.)
- Methods are entirely wet-lab. Confirmed from the abstract and from
OpenAlex MeSH/concepts (see below). Techniques used:
- Pharmacological FGF21 dosing of mice (in vivo).
- Plasma NEFA / triglyceride / lipid assays (enzymatic colorimetric).
- Hepatic VLDL-TG secretion (Triton/Poloxamer block, in vivo).
- Metabolic turnover studies with radiolabeled (³H/¹⁴C) TG-rich lipoprotein tracers → organ-specific uptake of radioactivity.
- Genetic mouse models: CD36-deficient mice; adipose-LPL-deficient transgenic mice; diet-induced-obese (DIO) and ob/ob mice.
- Primary hepatocyte / adipocyte cell culture.
- (Likely qPCR / Western blot for target genes — still wet-lab, not a pipeline.)
- OpenAlex MeSH (deduped): Animals, Hypolipidemic Agents, Adipose Tissue (Brown/White), Cells Cultured, Drug Evaluation Preclinical, Fibroblast Growth Factors, Lipoproteins VLDL, Liver, Mice Inbred C57BL, Mice Knockout, Hepatocytes, Lipid Metabolism, Triglycerides, Adipocytes White. No "Gene Expression Profiling", "Sequence Analysis", "Microarray", "Transcriptome", "Proteomics", or any high-throughput-omics MeSH term.
In-scope results
None. No bioinformatic pipeline is described or implied.
Out-of-scope results (not attempted — wet-lab / manual)
All figures and tables: plasma lipid time-courses, VLDL-TG secretion rates, tissue radioactivity-uptake bar charts, knockout-vs-WT comparisons, ob/ob & DIO tissue-distribution shifts. These are physical measurements from animal experiments; they cannot be recomputed from any deposited artifact (none exists) and are out of scope for a computational reproduction.
Conclusion
Honest drop. Per SCREENING.md taxonomy: non_pipeline (the RU is a wet-lab
physiology paper; no computational pipeline, no deposited data, no code). This is
a valid, expected outcome — recorded for the attrition curve, no fabrication.
No individual results have been recorded for this entry yet.
Assessments & scoring basis
Each contributor’s verdict, the per-question basis, and the auditable, itemised worksheet behind it.
An automated assessment. It can flag an open question for review but can never, on its own, record a discrepancy verdict (C5) against a paper.
Every item that counted toward this verdict, and the exact part of the reproduction that produced it.
PMID 26853749 (Schlein et al., Cell Metabolism 2016) is a pure wet-lab in-vivo mouse physiology + cell-culture study with no bioinformatic pipeline, no deposited data accession, and no code — correctly dropped as non_pipeline. All reported endpoints are physical measurements (lipid assays, radiolabeled-tracer organ uptake) that cannot be placed against any output (q1/q2 red on availability, not an authors' defect). No re-derivation was possible and the agent confirmed GEO/SRA are empty; there is no fabrication signal, so overall yellow reflects a sound study with nothing computationally reproducible.
Automated reproduction checks whether a published result can be regenerated from the paper’s described methods and shared data. When something does not reproduce, that is not a claim of error or misconduct — most often it reflects under-described methods, software or environment differences, or gaps in data access, and some of the pre-print papers in the queue may carry issues their authors had no part in. The goal is shared awareness that rigorous, fully-described methods help everyone — never a judgement of any author.
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Reproduction footprint
claude-opus-4-8Measured resources invested to assess this paper — sanitised (machine class only, no job ids/paths). Compute = HPC accounting (SLURM); tokens = the AI agent's session.