Errors in the interpretation of some of the data — the result of “procedural flaws” — are to blame for the retraction of a paper on a way to help skin grow back after injury.
The paper explores a method involving nanofibers. According to the abstract:
In this study, tilapia skin collagen sponge and electrospun nanofibers were developed for wound dressing…the collagen nanofibers stimulated the skin regeneration rapidly and effectively in vivo.
The paper was published January 19, 2015 by ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces, then retracted eight months later, in August. It has not been cited, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
Here’s the retraction note:
The authors retract the article “Development of Biomimetic Tilapia Collagen Nanofibers for Skin Regeneration through Inducing Keratinocytes Differentiation and Collagen Synthesis of Dermal Fibroblasts”, ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces2015, 7, 3253–3262, DOI: 10.1021/am507990m, on the basis that the interpretation of some experimental data and the representation of some of the cited literature were in error. Areas of concern include the methods of determining the denaturation temperature of the collagen, some of the associated references to the literature, and calculation of the data obtained from the immunoassay. Taken together, these errors warrant retraction. The Corresponding Author regrets the above errors and acknowledges that they were a result of procedural flaws.
We reached out to corresponding authors Xiumei Mo at Donghua University and Jiao Sun at Shanghai Jiaotong University School of Medicine in China for more details, and will update this post if we hear back.
Hat tip: Kerry Grens
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