Earlier this month we wrote about the retraction by Nature of a 19-year-old paper by Karel Bezouska, a former star researcher at Prague’s Charles University whose “dangerous and irresponsible deviations” from acceptable practice went as far as tampering with refrigerated samples to cover his tracks.
BMC Biotechnology has retracted another Bezouska paper, this one from 2011. He’s the second author on the article, titled “Heterologous expression, purification and characterization of nitrilase from Aspergillus niger K10.”
According to the retraction notice:
The authors have retracted the article “Heterologous expression, purification and characterization of nitrilase from Aspergillus niger K10” published in BMC Biotechnology (2011, 11:2). After publication of the article, the authors realized that MALDI data analysis of the wild-type enzyme in Figure 1 prepared by Karel Bezouska is erroneous. Specifically, the protein sequence of the nitrilase purified from Aspergillus niger K10 (designated Nit-ANigWT) is incorrect. Hence, the two enzymes in Figure 1 are not variants of the same enzyme as hypothesized in the original article. In light of this, the original conclusions are no longer valid and further investigation of this protein is in progress. The Ethical Committee of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and the Charles University in Prague has found evidence of scientific misconduct on the part of Karel Bezouska. We apologize to all affected parties.
The paper has been cited four times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
Do we know who is looking into the protein further?