Following the publication of our recent article in BMC Genomics [1] a number of aspects were called to our attention. We have carefully reviewed the experiments reported in this manuscript, as well as additional data from our laboratories, and would like to make the following points:

  1. 1.

    SW-850, included in our paper as a bladder cancer cell line, has been reported by several authors to be a pancreatic cancer cell line [2–5]. This is unlikely to be the case given that most pancreatic cancers are KRAS-mutant and both our analysis and a previous publication [5] indicate that the cells used are KRAS-wild type. However, given the controversy we recommend that these cells are not be used as bladder cancer models.

  2. 2.

    The Materials and Methods section of our paper indicated that the following cell lines were obtained from ATCC: 253 J, 575A, 639 V, JON, MGH-U4, SW-800, SW-1710, VM-CUB-2. However, these cultures have never been distributed by the ATCC. Therefore, they are available from us if other investigators are interested in using them.

  3. 3.

    It has been reported that UM-UC-2 is a T24 contaminant (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/biosample/SAMN03151953 ,http://web.expasy.org/cellosaurus/CVCL_8155, http://iclac.org/wp-content/uploads/Cross-Contaminations-v7_2.pdf). We have used fingerprinting analysis to confirm this fact and the genetic identity of the cells/DNAs used in our experiments (Table 1).

  4. 4.

    It has been reported that VM-CUB-3 is a VM-CUB-1 contaminant (http://iclac.org/wp-content/uploads/Cross-Contaminations-v7_2.pdf, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/biosample/3152040, http://web.expasy.org/cellosaurus/CVCL_9830). Nevertheless, our data indicate that the two cultures we used as VM-CUB-1 and VM-CUB-3 are distinct at the genomic level. Furthermore, as shown in Table 1, fingerprinting analysis clearly indicates that VM-CUB-1, VM-CUB-2, and VM-CUB-3 are different from each other. The origin of the DNA/cells in our paper was as indicated in the Material and Methods section and, therefore, investigators interested in these cells could directly address the corresponding co-authors.

Table 1 SNP fingerprint analysis of the bladder cancer cell lines suffering from an “identity crisis”
Full size table

In the last few years there has been much emphasis on the need to accurately designate, identify, and characterize cancer cell lines as they are precious tools for cell biology studies [6, 7]. It is with this aim that we wish to make these comments and clarifications related to our recently published work.