Taking on chemistry's reproducibility problem | News | Chemistry World

"Efforts to get to grips with the problem has meant new ideas and technologies are now being brought to bear...

Chemistry is to some extent in a ‘sweet spot’ when it comes to reproducing experiments as the apparatus used is usually not too exotic, notes Derek Lowe, a medicinal chemist who pens the In the pipeline blog. But he notes that, for instance, in natural product chemistry almost none of the multi-step syntheses used to produce the compound are a feasible way of getting to the product. As a result, most are never completely reproduced in the first place, explains Lowe. In fact, he says, products are often easy enough to obtain from their original source in most cases. What people do build on, Lowe says, is the unique techniques researchers use when creating compounds.

Medicinal chemistry and drug discovery literature are some of the more reproducible fields in chemistry, adds Lowe, as they’re more extensively conducted by industry scientists, who have fewer incentives to publish fake or substandard results. Lowe points out that industry researchers contribute more to patent literature, and patents lacking reproducibility and rigour could result in legal issues. Furthermore, Lowe believes irreproducibility is a bigger problem at high profile journals publishing cutting edge research, as well as low-end journals. Most solid papers are likely to be in what Lowe calls middle journals – those that are respectable, but not glamorous.

Interdisciplinary boundaries

This month, the Chemical Probes Portal saw its 275th compound added. This portal is part of the campaign to make science more reproducible and holds a database of many of the small molecules used in drug discovery and to investigate biological processes. The problems being addressed by the portal are twofold, says Amy Donner, its director in Boston. The smaller problem, she says, is that of making sure appropriate reagents are used in experiments. Whereas the larger issue that results in a ‘tremendous amount of irreproducibility that we see in the literature’ is misunderstanding how to use these highly potent chemical probes to tweak biological processes in living organisms...."