I would like to express my concerns regarding a paper that has been published in Nature Communications (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-55845-7). Some of the paper's experimental methods and data have proven to be unreliable, which is a matter of concern. I am currently investigating the validity of its findings. I would like to request that the authors respond to the following questions:
Fructose is a ketose, so it is difficult to carry out a successful derivatisation reaction with the PMP reagent. However, why does the HPLC chromatogram of the fructose standard appear in Supplementary Figure 4A? Is the successful derivatisation of fructose by the PMP reage
nt a coincidence? Has the repeatability and reliability of this result been verified? I remain sceptical that fructose can be successfully derivatised by the PMP reagent and consider such a result to be unreliable. I also need to question this journal. In particular, why did the reviewer not question this result? I would like to raise concerns about the quality of papers published in your journal. As a sub-journal of Nature, it is essential that reviewers carefully verify and confirm any controversial or inaccurate results during the review process. Following publication, unreliable results or experimental methods in the paper may be misinterpreted by readers or misused by researchers as references. The above represents my personal opinion. Thank you.
Dear Bin Lu
Do realize that you addressed your point(s) to the open Q&A forum. It is highly unlikely that the authors will see this. Furthermore, looking at the RG profiles that are linked to the paper
Article Selective utilization of medicinal polysaccharides by human ...
I think most of the (co-)authors are not that active here on RG.
I estimate that the best thing you can do is to raise your concerns on the dedicated platform PubPeer https://pubpeer.com
Best regards.
Dear Rob Keller
I appreciate the advice, but I've found that I can't post my opinions and discussion ideas anonymously on Pubpeer. I've tried many times, but the site moderators always seem to be unable to post my skepticism and opinions. I'm having trouble registering my username on Pubpeer. The "register" button is grayed out. So, I can only talk with you here about whether the results about this issue are true and reasonable.
All the best，
Dear Noel W Davies
I also hope that it is a writing error on the part of the authors. However, the authors have not directly addressed this question in a positive manner. Additionally, it is suspected that this part of the experimental work was not conducted independently, and that the methods described in the paper may have been copied from descriptions in other papers.
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