Kithiganahalli Narayanaswamy Balaji, a professor at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, has retracted two papers and corrected three for duplication of images.
Balaji, who won the 2011 Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize from India’s Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) “for outstanding contributions to science and technology,” is last author of the five papers, which were published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) from 2008 to 2015.
The authors take responsibility for what they call “inadvertent mistakes.” The retraction notice for “Pathogen-specific TLR2 protein activation programs macrophages to induce Wnt-β-catenin signaling,” for example, concludes as follows:
The authors state that the duplications occurred during primary assembly of the figures. The authors contacted the Journal, brought these errors to their attention, and provided the correct images. However, the authors state that the responsible course of action would be to withdraw the article to maintain the high standards and rigor of scientific literature. The authors apologize to the scientific community for what they state are inadvertent mistakes and will seek to republish the article with necessary corrections in due course.
The original paper has been cited 39 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
The other retracted paper — “Cooperative regulation of NOTCH1 protein-phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3K) signaling by NOD1, NOD2, and TLR2 receptors renders enhanced refractoriness to transforming growth factor-β (TGF-β)- or cytotoxic T-lymphocyte antigen 4 (CTLA-4)-mediated impairment of human dendritic cell maturation” — has been cited 18 times. The paper was flagged on PubPeer seven months ago.
The corrected papers are:
- NOTCH1 up-regulation and signaling involved in Mycobacterium bovis BCG-induced SOCS3 expression in macrophages (cited 65 times)
- The multifunctional PE_PGRS11 protein from Mycobacterium tuberculosis plays a role in regulating resistance to oxidative stress (cited 38 times)
- Ac2PIM-responsive miR-150 and miR-143 target receptor-interacting protein kinase 2 and transforming growth factor beta-activated kinase 1 to suppress NOD2-induced immunomodulators (cited 5 times)
Another JBC paper by Balaji, who has not responded to our requests for comment, has also been flagged on PubPeer, as has one in the Journal of Immunology.
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