Two biologists have retracted a second paper on the development of neurons, but that’s about all we know.
The 2007 paper from the Journal of Biological Chemistry, “The Interaction of mPar3 with the Ubiquitin Ligase Smurf2 Is Required for the Establishment of Neuronal Polarity,” concerns the role of a protein, mPar3, in neuron development. It has been cited 29 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
We don’t know why this one was retracted, because JBC (as usual) offered no explanation in its retraction note:
This article has been withdrawn by the authors.
The manager of publication issues at the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, JBC’s publisher, declined to comment further, once again citing the journal’s policy to maintain confidentiality “regarding these matters.”
We do know that it is the second recent retraction for co-authors Jens Christian Schwamborn at the University of Luxembourg and Andreas Püschel at the University of Münster. The previous retraction, from The EMBO Journal, was due to “image aberrations and/or duplications.” (For German speakers, Leonid Schneider wrote a background piece on that retraction for Laborjournal.)
Both articles were critiqued on PubMed Commons, with commenters pointing out signs of duplications and splicing in figures.
We’ve reached out to both Schwamborn and Püschel to comment. We’ll update if we hear back.
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What good is that? “This paper has been withdrawn by the authors.” For what? Duplication? In that case, the data’s OK. Fraud? In that case, toss the data. Image manipulation? …and so on…