Comment by jryb

When you’re deciding which antibodies to buy you’ll look at these figures to get a sense of their quality. Antibodies aren’t perfect and might bind proteins unrelated to the one you want to study. Depending on your application, some off-target binding might be acceptable, but usually it’s not. Also, they might just be completely nonfunctional and bind nothing (perhaps due to missteps during manufacturing).

So what this fraud does is convince you to give these antibodies a chance when you otherwise wouldn’t have. You should validate them yourself and show they only bind your target before doing an experiment, but now you’re just wasting time and money evaluating something that’s guaranteed to fail.

Antibodies are notoriously unreliable, so you might have to give two or three vendors a try before you get one that works. Now I’m starting to wonder how much of that reputation is due to fraud and not just nature.