Caught Our Notice: Voinnet co-author issues another correction

Title: AtsPLA2-α nuclear relocalization by the Arabidopsis transcription factor AtMYB30 leads to repression of the plant defense response

What Caught Our Attention:  A previous collaborator with high-profile plant biologist Olivier Voinnet (who now has eight retractions) has issued an interesting correction to a 2010 PNAS paper. Susana Rivas is last author on the paper, the correction for which notes some images were duplicated, and others were “cropped and/or stretched to match the other blots.” Rivas is currently a group leader at The Laboratory of Plant-Microbe Interactions (LIPM), “a combined INRA-CNRS Research Unit.”

Rivas has five retractions, including one co-authored by Voinnet. The latest correction acknowledges that the images were reused in two later papers by Rivas’s group, both of which were recently retracted due to image issues: In Dec. 2017, Rivas and her colleagues requested the retraction of a 2011 paper in The Plant Cell due to “inappropriate duplication of images;” another retraction, issued by PLoS ONE in Jan. 2018, was the result of “inconsistencies” in several of the images.

Some of her papers are being discussed on PubPeer. On March 3 2017, the last author of a paper from New Phytologist posted a comment saying that an “official correction” for image issues will be published by the journal:

Finally, we add the very important note that neither this experiment not the Figure were generated by Dr. Susana Rivas. We thank the anonymous peer who originally flagged this issue and for bringing it to our attention.

More than one year later, the correction has not appeared.

Journal: PNAS

Authors: Solène Froidure, Joanne Canonne, Xavier Daniel, Alain Jauneau, Christian Brière, Dominique Roby and Susana Rivas

Affiliations: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique-Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique, France; Institut Fédératif de Recherche 40, France;

The Notice:

The undersigned authors wish to note, “We acknowledge inappropriate reuse of two Ponceau images from Fig. 2B and Fig. S4 of the PNAS paper in later publications of our group (see doi.org/ 10.1105/tpc.17.00567 and doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0190773). We hereby confirm that the original images are those first published in PNAS. When preparing the figures for submission to PNAS, the raw images were cropped and/or stretched to match the other blots and saved in the format for submission. Unfortunately, we did not systematically archive an independent copy of each raw image, and only the final version of the figures was stored. Fig. 3 appears to have areas of unmarked splicing and background inconsistencies, but we are confident, however, in the scientific accuracy of the data despite being unable to provide the original images.

“Further, we acknowledge that images of yeast colonies in Fig. S1B are indeed duplicated. Our intention was to represent the presence (or absence) of yeast growth observed with the different protein combinations. We recognize that this should have been clearly indicated in the figure legend and apologize for this omission. We have been able to retrieve the original results and prepared the revised figure below showing growth of yeast colonies expressing the different protein combinations. We apologize for any inconvenience the publication of these figures may have caused.”

The corrected Fig. S1 and its corrected legend appear below. The SI has been corrected online.

Date of Article: August 2010

Times Cited, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science: 48

Date of Notice: March 19, 2018 (when URL will be publicly available)

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