RETRACTION

Cao, L., Wang, L., Zheng, M., Cao, H., Ding, L., Zhang, X., and Fu, Y. (2013). Arabidopsis AUGMIN Subunit8 is a microtubule plus-end binding protein that promotes microtubule reorientation in hypocotyls. Plant Cell 25: 2187–2201.

The authors request that this article be retracted due to the discovery of contamination of some of the materials used. In the original article, we reported that AUG8 localized at the plus end of growing microtubules. Unfortunately, we have found that the material used in this study was inadvertently contaminated by an Arabidopsis transgenic line expressing GFP-fused EB1b. Because EB1b is an established microtubule binding protein localized at the plus end of microtubules, some of our observations using this plant material misled us to conclude that “AUG8 is a microtubule plus-end binding protein.” Now we realize that this conclusion lacks evidence. We apologize and accept the responsibility for these errors.

Except for the experiment used to show that AUG8 was localized at the plus end of growing microtubules, none of the other experiments used the contaminated material. Therefore, we believe that all other results remain reliable, showing a longer hypocotyl in the aug8 mutant compared to the wild type. We have also demonstrated that the twisted epidermal cells of the aug8 mutant were rescued by the coding sequence of AUG8, and the mean hypocotyl lengths of two complemented lines were shorter than that of the aug8 mutant. Thus, the longer hypocotyl of the aug8 mutant was attributed to the loss of AUG8 function and the conclusion remains reliable that AUG8 is a microtubule-associated protein that promotes microtubule reorientation by regulating the dynamic instability of microtubules.

We are completing follow-up experiments to verify the major findings and further clarify the role of AUG8 in microtubule reorientation.

All authors agree to this retraction.