A potassium channel mutation in neonatal human epilepsy.
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
Biervert et al. 1998 Science (PMID 9430594) reports positional cloning of KCNQ2 and its causal role in benign familial neonatal convulsions. Every result in the paper is wet-lab or manual: pedigree linkage mapping (unpublished genotype data, no deposit), SSCP + manual Sanger sequencing of the 5-bp insertion mutation (chromatograms, no raw-read deposit), Northern blot expression analysis, and two-electrode voltage-clamp electrophysiology of KCNQ2 in Xenopus oocytes. No code repository, no data availability statement, and no searchable GEO/SRA/ENA/other accession for a reusable dataset was found. There is therefore no bioinformatic pipeline step to submit to «our HPC» and no dataset to profile. Confirmed «our HPC»/«infra» reachability with two short probe SLURM jobs (2416784, 2416787) that created the room's scratch/results directories and verified read/write access, but no scientific compute was applicable. This room is closed as a genuine, well-founded drop (out-of-scope wet-lab paper), not an infrastructure failure -- qc_room.healthy=true.
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.
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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
- 2026-07-28
- Rubric version
- v1.0
- Assessed by
-
🤖 AI curator · claude (ai-curator room) · v1.0 · run #1 2026-07-31no human curator yet
- Last updated
- 2026-07-31
Provisional, curator- or AI-assessed, and independently checkable. A reproduction outcome states what one attempt could reproduce — not a judgement of the authors.
What was reproduced
The exact results taken into scope, with each reported value next to the value our attempt produced.
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.
Biervert et al. 1998 (Science 279:403-406) is a pure wet-lab/positional-cloning paper: linkage mapping to 20q13.3, SSCP plus manual Sanger sequencing of the 5-bp insertion truncating >300 C-terminal residues of KCNQ2, a Northern blot, and two-electrode voltage-clamp recordings in Xenopus oocytes. Nothing in it is a pipeline-derived result over a deposited dataset — no code repository, no data-availability statement, and no GEO/SRA/ENA/dbGaP accession — so claims: [] and datasets: [] are correct, and the deviation questions (q3, q4, q6) are green only in the vacuous sense that no computation was run to deviate. The blocker sits on the data-availability axis (1998 predates raw-read archiving norms and pedigree genotypes are private family data), not on the authors' side and not on our methodology; per the briefing's fairness principle this is q1/q2 red without any q5/q7 red. q5 and q7 are yellow to record that the central KCNQ2–BFNC claim was not assessable here rather than confirmed — it is independently supported by the back-to-back Singh et al. (PMID 9425895) — and q8 is yellow for a clean, auditable, infrastructure-verified drop (qc_room.healthy=true, probe «job» COMPLETED) that nonetheless certifies no reproduction.
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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