RETRACTION
Volume 14, no. 7, p. 684–697, 2015. The authors and the journal hereby retract this article. After publication, several of the authors found that this article contained multiple images with fabricated or falsified data in violation of ASM's ethical standards. In Fig. 9A, the bovine serum albumin degradation gel is identical to that published in Fig. 6A of another article by A. A. Chavez-Dozal et al. (Eukaryot Cell 14:1228–1239, 2015). The original data images are labeled as strain tetR-SEC15 images. Thus, lanes 4 and 5 of Fig. 9A are incorrectly attributed to strain tetR-SEC6. In Fig. 9B, it is stated that a lipase assay was performed after 24 h of doxycycline (DOX) inhibition. However, review of original graphs in lab data files indicate that this experiment was performed at 5 h of DOX inhibition. Furthermore, our lab has not been able to replicate this particular lipase assay successfully from a technical standpoint at the date of submission of this retraction. In Fig. 6, some rows of spotted cells are duplicates of the exact same images. In Fig. 4A, cells attributed to strains THE1-CIp10 and THE1-CIp10+DOX have been taken from raw images labeled tetR-SEC15. The source files also have different dates of creation and are not from a single experiment. Finally, the cell death assays (Fig. 1) were repeated. The article reports that tetR-SEC6 cells remain viable until after 27 h of treatment with DOX, with 100% cell death occurring by 72 h. In contrast, upon repeating the assay, we found that approximately 5/6 of cells are inviable after 24 h of DOX treatment, with the last 1/6 of cells remaining viable even after 72 h of DOX treatment. Again in contrast to the reported finding that cell death begins after 24 h, we have found that cell death begins after only 6 to 7 h of treatment with DOX. These findings undermine many of the conclusions of the published article. Since the integrity of the data and conclusions as presented are compromised, this publication is retracted in its entirety. We apologize to the readers of Eukaryotic Cell and regret any inconvenience this causes.
This retraction was added to the December 2015 issue of Eukaryotic Cell. As of January 2016, research on eukaryotic microbes is published by ASM’s multidisciplinary, open-access journal mSphere®.