It was hailed as a potentially transformative technique for measuring brain activity in animals: direct imaging of neuronal activity (DIANA) held the promise of mapping neuronal activity so fast that neurons could be tracked as they fired. But nearly two years on from the 2022 Science paper1, no one outside the original research group and their collaborators has been able to reproduce the results.
Now, two teams have published a record of their replication attempts — and failures. The studies, published on 27 March in Science Advances2,3, suggest that the original results were due to experimental error or data cherry-picking, not neuronal activity after all.
But the lead researcher behind the original technique stands by the results. “I’m also very curious as to why other groups fail in reproducing DIANA,” says Jang-Yeon Park, a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) physicist at Sungkyunkwan University in Suwon, South Korea.
Science said in an e-mail to Nature that, although it’s important to report the negative results, the Science Advances studies “do not allow a definitive conclusion” to be drawn about the original work, “because there were methodological differences between the papers”.
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