This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/article-withdrawal).
This article is being retracted at the request of the senior author following correspondence from that author alerting the journal to an investigation at their institution, Princess Margaret Cancer Centre.
The Internal Investigation Committee found that research misconduct had occurred in two instances of falsification of Western blot data, in that the irregularities in the images were the result of a deliberate action and could not have occurred by chance. The Committee did not find sufficient evidence to determine who engaged in the misconduct, and no motivations were ascribed to these instances of misconduct.
These irregularities are in Figure 1B and 2E. Portions of the actin bands in Fig. 1B used for both the ATG7 and the WT conditions are identical after differential cropping, vertical compression, and a slight rotation. The Actin bands in Fig. 2E and in a figure in a paper published in British Journal of Cancer are identical after the band is flipped horizontally and the aspect ratio is changed (Figure 3A “Effect of pantoprazole to enhance activity of docetaxel against human tumour xenografts by inhibiting autophagy”; British Journal of Cancer volume 112, pages 832-840 (2015) doi: 10.1038/bjc.2015.17).
The authors regret this inconvenience to the Journal and its publisher.