Concern about Figure 1. Some 'corner clones' - repetitive areas with one of the duplicates present in a corner, perhaps to cover a previous label - might be observed.
Here is the full Figure 1.
I did not receive any compensation to comment on this specific paper.
Dr. Bik,
thank you for bringing these issues to my attention. At first glance I am fairly sure that these panels pertain to experiments carried out in my lab and not the Tessier-Lavigne lab. Since I keep an archive of all the submitted manuscripts, I was able to find the pdf file containing the final version of the manuscript submitted. As you can see from the attached image of panel I, the "I" character is much bigger in our submitted manuscript, and there aren't any obvious duplications in its corner. This makes me think that this panel was altered by the journal post-submission. I will now get in touch with the first author and dig deeper.
Artur Kania
(I am posting this comment using the anonymous mode as I am waiting for my PubPeer account to get verified)
Thank you, Dr. Kania, for checking this. If the journal indeed photoshopped your photos without telling you, to adapt the images to their home-style, that would be very alarming. But it would explain why only the top left corners are affected.
For the record, see below the panels from the final submission to the journal.
Dr. Bik, I hope that based on the above images you can conclude that we submitted the manuscript to the journal without the top left corner image alterations. I think that your findings can be explained by the journal editing the top left corner of the panels and replacing our panel letters with smaller ones, most likely to conform to the journal's style.
I also hope that you and the readers of this blog can conclude that these alterations do not change the conclusions of our experiments in any way, or are in the part of the image essential to data interpretatopm.
I do agree that the post-submission alterations are worrisome, but adding panel letters is an image alteration itself because the added letter obscures a part of the image.
Artur Kania
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