SYSTEMS BIOLOGY Retraction for “Identification of gene ontologies linked to prefrontal–hippocampal functional coupling in the human brain,” by Luanna Dixson, Henrik Walter, Michael Schneider, Susanne Erk, Axel Schäfer, Leila Haddad, Oliver Grimm, Manuel Mattheisen, Markus M. Nöthen, Sven Cichon, Stephanie H. Witt, Marcella Rietschel, Sebastian Mohnke, Nina Seiferth, Andreas Heinz, Heike Tost, and Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, which appeared in issue 26, July 1, 2014, of Proc Natl Acad Sci USA (111:9657–9662; first published June 16, 2014; 10.1073/pnas.1404082111).
The authors wish to note the following: “In this paper we report an association of the ‘synapse organization and biogenesis’ gene set with a neuroimaging phenotype, using gene set enrichment methodology. The methods and results of the paper, as described, have been conducted after consultation with experts in the field and support this conclusion. However, a potential confound relating to statistical inference has been brought to our attention that arises from the fact that several clustered genes, all of which are included in this gene set, have been tagged by the same SNP. This problem, which concerns only a small fraction of our tested gene sets (unfortunately including our top finding), belongs to a known category of potential pitfalls in gene set association analyses, and we are sorry that this problem was not detected earlier. Our reanalyses suggest that if adjustments for this confound are applied, the results for our top finding no longer reach experiment-wide significance. Therefore, we feel that the presented findings are not currently sufficiently robust to provide definitive support for the conclusions of our paper, and that an extensive reanalysis of the data is required. The authors have therefore unanimously decided to retract this paper at this time.”
Luanna Dixson
Henrik Walter
Michael Schneider
Susanne Erk
Axel Schäfer
Leila Haddad
Oliver Grimm
Manuel Mattheisen
Markus M. Nöthen
Sven Cichon
Stephanie H. Witt
Marcella Rietschel
Sebastian Mohnke
Nina Seiferth
Andreas Heinz
Heike Tost
Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg