GENETICS. For the article “A common mutational pattern in Cockayne syndrome patients from xeroderma pigmentosum group G: Implications for a second XPG function,” by Thierry Nouspikel, Philippe Lalle Steven A. Leadon Priscilla K. Cooper and Stuart G. Clarkson, which appeared in issue 7, April 1, 1997, of Proc Natl Acad Sci USA (94:3116–3121), the editors wish to note that Steven Anthony Leadon has submitted a letter to PNAS that states, “I have recently had the opportunity to review some of the raw data used for Figure 6 in this paper in the above-referenced publication and it is clear that the data as reported in this figure cannot be relied upon. Therefore, I request that you retract Figure 6 of this paper.” Fig. 6 is hereby retracted.
Leadon's request for retraction of Fig. 6 is part of a Voluntary Exclusion Agreement Leadon entered into with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) through the Public Health Service and the Office of Research Integrity in the case of Steven Anthony Leadon, University of North Carolina. The specific terms of the Agreement between Leadon and HHS are published in the Notice of Findings of Scientific Misconduct from HHS [71 Federal Register 110 (June 8, 2006/Notices), pp 33308–33309].
The editors also wish to note that the other authors of the PNAS article (Thierry Nouspikel, Philippe Lalle, Priscilla K. Cooper, and Stuart G. Clarkson) and the communicating member (Philip C. Hanawalt) have submitted the following statement to PNAS: “Figs. 1 through 5 in the PNAS paper document experiments performed by Thierry Nouspikel and Philippe Lalle in Stuart Clarkson's laboratory in Geneva, in which it was established that XP-G patients with severe early onset Cockayne syndrome (CS) produce truncated and unstable XPG proteins but that a pair of mildly affected XP-G siblings without symptoms of CS are able to synthesize a full-length product from one allele with a missense mutation. The conclusion was that XPG must have a second function in addition to its role as a structure-specific nuclease in nucleotide excision repair. The validity of that conclusion is not challenged by the retraction of Fig. 6, and the abstract stands correct. The conclusions of the paper have been confirmed independently by a number of laboratories [e.g., Shiomi et al. (2004) Mol Cell Biol 24:3712–3719; Tian et al. (2004) Mol Cell Biol 24:2237–2242; Zafeiriou et al. (2001) Pediatr Res 49:407–412; Emmert et al. (2002) J Invest Dermatol 118:972–982].”