On April 17th, Mathieu Bollen, a researcher at KU Leuven in Belgium, received a notice from PubPeer: A paper he had published in 2013 appeared to have data duplications.
The article, “Maternal Embryonic Leucine Zipper Kinase (MELK) Reduces Replication Stress in Glioblastoma Cells,” published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, offered an explanation for why elevated levels of the MELK protein are associated with growth of a particular kind of brain tumor, glioblastoma. Several clinical trials are investigating MELK inhibitors as cancer treatments.
Bollen, the paper’s corresponding author, told Retraction Watch that one instance of image duplication, the inclusion of a gel-band from an unrelated experiment to represent a control, was “worrisome” but easily explainable:
Continue reading Author cops to “randomly” choosing data for figures in paper, colleagues say