Retraction for Holweg and Nick, Arabidopsis myosin XI mutant is defective in organelle movement and polar auxin transport

PLANT BIOLOGY. For the article “Arabidopsis myosin XI mutant is defective in organelle movement and polar auxin transport,” by Carola Holweg and Peter Nick, which appeared in issue 28, July 13, 2004, of Proc Natl Acad Sci USA (101:10488–10493; first published July 6, 2004; 10.1073/pnas.0403155101), the authors wish to note the following: “We must retract the results published in the article. In further investigations of the mya2-1 knockout (SAIL_414_C04), we detected a second deletion upstream and adjacent to the MYA2 locus, and a complementation assay performed with the whole genomic sequence of MYA2, including the promoter (10.5 kb), revealed no significant differences between the dwarf phenotype of the original mutant line and the mya2-rescued line. The analysis included parameters such as shoot length, cytoplasmic streaming, hypocotyl length, epidermal cell length, and root hair length. Therefore, the phenotype of the original knockout line was probably due to the second deletion upstream of the MYA2 gene. Since our original publication, and consistent with our new results, others have observed no major defects resulting from inactivation of any of the 13 myosin XI genes in the Arabidopsis thaliana genome (1–3); inactivation of the MYA2 and XI-K genes resulted only in defects in root hair growth and organelle trafficking (2, 3).”