Retraction: Nitric Oxide Mediates Relative Airway Hyporesponsiveness to Lipopolysaccharide in Surfactant Protein A–Deficient Mice

The authors of “Nitric Oxide Mediates Relative Airway Hyporesponsiveness to Lipopolysaccharide in Surfactant Protein A–Deficient Mice,” (1) in conjunction with the Journal editors, have decided to retract the article.

Following an inquiry at Duke University, the authors were informed that the flexiVent data reported in Table 1, Figure 1, and Figure 7 provided by the animal pulmonary physiology laboratory at Duke University may have been unreliable. An independent laboratory at Duke University led by Dr. Herman Staats was therefore asked to repeat the pulmonary physiology experiments. The laboratory was able to substantiate the results shown in Table 1 and Figure 1. However, the laboratory could not confirm the major finding of the publication that treatment with the inducible nitric oxide synthase–specific inhibitor 1400W abrogated relative airway hyporesponsiveness in LPS-treated SP-A^−/− mice, nor could it confirm that treatment with 1400W further enhanced airway responsiveness in LPS-treated wild-type mice, as reported in Figure 7. Thus, the data obtained from the repeated experiments do not support the main published conclusion that the relative airway hyporesponsiveness of the LPS-treated SP-A^−/− mice may be at least partly attributed to an inducible nitric oxide synthase–dependent mechanism.

In addition, the animal physiology laboratory at Duke University maintained a portion of the SP-A^−/− mice and also provided an LPS stock solution that was used in Figure 6. However, the experiments in Figures 2 through 6 were generated and analyzed by laboratories other than the Duke animal pulmonary physiology laboratory; these data were not part of the unreliable flexiVent dataset.

We apologize to our colleagues and the scientific community for any inconvenience this might have caused.