The measurement of the cell yield in liquid cultures confirmed what observed in the spot assay analysis (Fig. 3C).

I bumped into this sentence today, and that “what observed” feels like it’s missing a was, i.e. What should be “what has been observed”? I can even explain it as an italianism, seen as the sentence would translate to “hanno confermato quanto osservato “, where quanto is a relative pronoun and hence translates to what, and osservato is the past participle of osservare=observe, hence translates to observed, stitch the two together et voilu00e0, “what observed”. I am not native and have no detailed grammatical rule to support this claim though, which is why I am asking: Is

this acceptable or is it ungrammatical, as my gut feeling suggests? Could you pinpoint why it’s ungrammatical if it’s?

Can I ask my friend to show me your meter?