Incorrect Use of The Web Databases Can Result in Incorrect Information for the Readers: The Case of Lactate-Mitochondria Affair

Abstract

One of the outstanding problems in biochemistry as well as in biological sciences is whether and how each research paper and in particular each review paper reports up-to date information on a specific topic. We suggest to resort to available data bases that sort publications by relevance (i.e. WEB of Sciences and SCOPUS) or by best match (i.e. PubMed). For instance, when searching for “lactate metabolism and cancer mitochondria” on July 9th2018, one finds more than 950 results that includes in the first 6, three publications from the Passarella Lab showing that cancer mitochondria can take up and metabolize externally added D and L-lactate [1-3]. This finding is further confirmed in the 14th and 15th papers on the list [4,5]. Surprisingly, the mitochondrial lactate metabolism in cancer cells is essentially ignored in all listed papers including the one published by the Gladden’s lab, which is listed at 43th place [6].