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In December, Dr Vikash Bhardwaj from Lovely Professional University in India published an article in F1000Research that showed that he was able to generate PCR products in a parallel (rather than antiparallel) direction. In this blog post he describes some of the opportunities and conversations that followed this publication, and introduces his opinion piece “Villain of Molecular Biology: Why are we not reproducible in research?”

 

Science sometimes moves in the forward direction and sometimes in the backward direction with the sole purpose of auto-correcting itself. We learn from both successes and failures. In the last few decades, there have been many reports of successful experiments but less discussion about failures. This has resulted in an alarming situation: every year in the USA alone $28 billion invested in pre-clinical research is irreproducible. You can imagine the total wastage throughout the whole world. It indicates that there is some fundamental problem which needs to be addressed; otherwise a time will come when we will be unable to distinguish between science and pseudoscience.

Science leads us towards truth and the closer we are to truth, the closer will we be to finding solutions for deadly diseases like cancer, malaria, TB, AIDS etc. In the last few decades humans have been successful in launching satellites and landing on other planets. This was possible because we accepted the truth first established by the great Galileo Galilei that the earth revolves around the sun. Could it have been possible for the space scientists to achieve these targets without accepting this truth?

I’ve raised the issue that one of the fundamental issues in molecular biology research is that molecular scientists have accepted the antiparallel DNA model but have neglected a parallel stranded DNA model. A few months back I developed a PCR technique in which I and Dr Kulbhushan showed that a different but related PCR product can be synthesized differing from the template used, breaking the conventional approach which states that only an exact copy of template DNA can be amplified by PCR. This way we also proved that synthesis in a parallel direction is possible. After publishing in F1000Research, I was invited to the qPCR and Digital PCR Congress USA 2015 to give a talk on this parallel direction PCR technique. I received travel support from Department of Biotechnology (DBT) of the Government of India but unfortunately due to a USA visa issue, was unable to attend the conference.

In the meantime I was contacted by Nickolai Tchurikov, (Engelhardt Institute of Molecular Biology, Russian Federation) who said that his lab was able to replicate the PD-PCR work. This replication of my work makes me more confident to share my views on the irreproducibility problem in life science. I strongly believes that many of the molecular techniques (Southern and northern hybridization siRNA, PCR, microarray, gene knockout, gene therapy, CRISPR and many more) can be optimized by considering both parallel and antiparallel hybridization of two strands of DNA.

My views are expanded in this opinion article for F1000Research. I look forward for discussion and collaborative support from academia and industry in making molecular biology research accurately reproducible, leading scientific investigations further to find solutions to alleviate humanity’s problems.