Erratum: Corrigendum: The cold-induced lipokine 12,13-diHOME promotes fatty acid transport into brown adipose tissue
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.
- ✓Any deviation was negligible
- 🔴Could not use the authors’ exact input data
- 🔴Reported values were only indirectly comparable
- 🟡A deviation arose in the data or preprocessing
- 🔴A deviation was attributed to the published material
- 🟡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
PMID 29117173 is a Corrigendum (Nat Med 23(11):1384, Nov 2017, DOI 10.1038/nm1117-1384b) -- a correction notice, NOT a primary research article -- to Lynes et al. Nat Med 2017 'The cold-induced lipokine 12,13-diHOME promotes fatty acid transport into brown adipose tissue' (DOI 10.1038/nm.4297, PMID 28346411, PMC5699924). The candidate was harvested off the original article's title; the RU itself has no methods, data, or code (Europe PMC datalinks hitCount=0). The four corrections it makes are all wet-lab/manual/statistical-choice: (1) Fig 2g figure-assembly normalization-to-tissue-weight fix, (2) Fig 3e omitted P<0.05 asterisk inserted, (3) Fig 3f legend replicate count 5-7 not 8, (4) clarification that one-tailed t-tests were used only with a strong prior hypothesis else two-tailed. None is a bioinformatic-pipeline output. The corrected original is a wet-lab lipidomics (LC-MS/MS) + mouse cold-exposure physiology + cell uptake-assay study with NO public omics accession (Europe PMC accession text-mining empty; only Altmetric + the article's own BioStudies supplement linked) and NO code repository. There is therefore no pipeline-derived result with a reproducible deposited input to attempt -> clean DROP (non_pipeline; secondary gaps no_code + no_data_accession). No compute was submitted to «our HPC». NOT attempted: the wet-lab measurements and the manual figure/statistics corrections, which are out of scope by construction. Verdict is provisional and human-auditable.
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 ⛓ b640f3bbbf90
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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
Model: opusWhether the lipid 12,13-dihydroxy-9Z-octadecenoic acid (12,13-diHOME) is a stimulator of brown adipose tissue (BAT) activity whose levels are negatively correlated with body-mass index and insulin resistance.
- ★ 12,13-diHOME is a stimulator of BAT activity finding
- ★ 12,13-diHOME levels are negatively correlated with body-mass index and insulin resistance finding
- FATP1 oligomer density in immunoblots was quantitated by drawing identical regions of interest per lane at the same molecular weight and measuring integrated pixel density in ImageJ, normalized to the control lane method
| Assay | System | Perturbation | Readout | Platform |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Western blot (immunoblot) with membrane fractionation | — | none | FATP1 oligomer integrated pixel density normalized to control lane | ImageJ software |
- ▼ 12,13-diHOME levels negatively correlated with body-mass index and insulin resistance
Statistical methods review
Model: sonnetA neutral, descriptive read of the statistical approach — what was done, and (for shared learning, not as criticism) what could also have been done.
The submitted text is a published corrigendum (correction notice), not the full original article. It corrects one word in the abstract and clarifies the image-analysis procedure used to quantify FATP1 oligomer density in Figure 4f. No inferential statistical methods are described in this document.
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Normalized integrated pixel density values from immunoblots are summarized with s.e.m.↳ Could also: Standard deviation (SD) or a 95% confidence interval could also be used to express dispersion of the normalized replicate values. — When the number of independent experimental replicates is small (as is typical in immunoblot studies), SD conveys the actual spread of replicate measurements, and a 95% CI captures estimation uncertainty; both are interpretable without assumptions about the reader's knowledge of sample size, whereas SEM shrinks with n and can appear artificially narrow.
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Normalization is performed lane-by-lane to a single control lane (or the average of two control lanes when present) within each replicate.↳ Could also: Total-protein normalization (e.g., Ponceau S or GAPDH loading control) followed by ratio-to-control could also serve as the reference, or a mixed-effects model could account for replicate-level variation explicitly. — Normalizing to a housekeeping or total-protein signal can reduce technical lane-loading variability independently of control-lane selection; a mixed-effects model would additionally allow formal estimation of between-replicate variance.
What was reproduced
The exact results taken into scope, with each reported value next to the value our attempt produced.
Scope — PMID 29117173
Publication identity
- Title: Corrigendum: The cold-induced lipokine 12,13-diHOME promotes fatty acid transport into brown adipose tissue
- PMID: 29117173 · DOI: 10.1038/nm1117-1384b
- Journal: Nature Medicine 23(11):1384 (Nov 2017)
- Type: Corrigendum (published erratum) — a correction notice, not a primary research article.
- Corrects: Lynes MD et al., Nat Med 23(5):631–637 (May 2017), DOI 10.1038/nm.4297, PMID 28346411, PMCID PMC5699924.
- Author Christian Schlein (the operator) is a co-author of the corrected paper.
What this RU actually is
This RU is a corrigendum, i.e. a short correction notice attached to a wet-lab lipidomics / mouse-physiology paper. The candidate was almost certainly harvested as a literature hit on the original article's title; the RU id points at the correction, which has no methods, no data, and no code of its own.
What the corrigendum changes (verbatim substance)
- Fig. 2g — a figure-assembly error meant some 12,13-diHOME levels were plotted not normalized to tissue weight; corrected.
- Fig. 3e — an asterisk denoting P < 0.05 for liver was omitted; inserted.
- Fig. 3f legend — biological replicates per tissue should read 5–7, not 8.
- Statistics clarification — one-tailed t-tests were used only where a strong prior hypothesis existed (e.g. expecting increased epoxide-hydrolase under cold); two-tailed otherwise.
All four corrections concern wet-lab lipidomic measurements, manual figure assembly, a legend typo, and statistical-test choice. None is the output of a bioinformatic pipeline.
In scope (pipeline-derived, public data + identifiable expected result)
- None. The corrigendum has zero associated data or code (Europe PMC datalinks hitCount = 0). The corrected original paper (PMC5699924) likewise ships no sequencing/omics accession (Europe PMC accession text-mining empty; only Altmetric + the article's own BioStudies supplement are linked) and no code repository. Its data are LC-MS/MS lipidomics, mouse cold- exposure physiology, and cell-uptake assays — instrument/wet-lab derived, quantified manually in statistics software, not via a reproducible bioinformatic pipeline with deposited raw inputs.
Out of scope (wet-lab / manual / external)
- The entire original study: targeted/untargeted lipidomics (mass spec), mouse cold-exposure and tissue fatty-acid-uptake assays, primary/immortalized adipocyte culture, human serum diHOME measurements. These are wet-lab and cannot be reproduced from deposited data + code.
- The four corrigendum corrections themselves: figure re-assembly, a significance asterisk, a replicate-count typo, and a one- vs two-tailed test clarification — all manual / statistical-choice, no pipeline.
Verdict
DROP — non_pipeline (text-mining false positive: the RU is a corrigendum /
correction notice, not a computational-pipeline reproduction). Supporting
secondary gaps if treated as a normal RU: no_code (no analysis code
repository) and no_data_accession (no public reusable data accession; only
the article's own supplementary tables). No bioinformatic result is pinnable to a
reproducible deposited input, so no compute was submitted to «our HPC».
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.
This RU is a Corrigendum to Lynes et al. Nat Med 2017, not a primary computational paper — it has no methods, data, or code of its own, and its four corrections are figure-assembly/legend/statistics fixes that are wet-lab or manual in nature. There is no deposited omics accession (datalinks hitCount=0; only the article's own BioStudies supplement) and no code repository, so no reported value can be put 1:1 against any reproduced output. This is a data-availability/scope limitation on our side of the ledger (correctly a clean non_pipeline DROP), not an authors' defect or fabrication signal — the corrigendum explicitly preserves the original conclusions. Severity is negligible and there is nothing audit-worthy on integrity grounds; the only flag is that the candidate was harvested off a correction notice.
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.