Beware of memes in the interpretation of your results – lessons from gene-disrupted mice in fertilization research

Abstract

For decades, researchers in the fertilization field reported various candidate factors involved in sperm–egg interaction through experiments using enzyme inhibitors and/or antibodies. However, almost all of these factors have been shown to be nonessential by gene disruption experiments. Recently, attention has focused on the low reproducibility of papers in many research fields. In this Review, I retrospectively revisit how fertilization factors were misinterpreted and led to wrong hypotheses in relation to the reportedly low reproducibility of scientific papers.