GENETICS Retraction for “Bacterial persistence by RNA endonucleases,” by Etienne Maisonneuve, Lana J. Shakespeare, Mikkel Girke Jørgensen, and Kenn Gerdes, which was first published July 25, 2011; 10.1073/pnas.1100186108 (Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 108:13206–13211).
The authors wish to note the following: “In this article, we reported that successive deletion of 10 toxin-antitoxin (TA) modules of Escherichia coli K-12 progressively reduced the level of spontaneously formed antibiotic-tolerant persisters. After the publication of the article, we became aware that crucial strains including some of the TA module deletion series were infected with bacteriophage phi80, a notorious laboratory contaminant. We thus reconstructed and analyzed all strains in a phi80-free background to examine the effect of lysogenization on spontaneous persister formation. We found that major parts of our original data (Figs. 2, 3, and 4, and Figs. S6 and S7) were affected by phi80 carriage and our new data (1) no longer support that successive deletion of TA loci progressively reduces persistence. The conclusion that ectopic overproduction of individual TA-encoded mRNase toxins dramatically increases antibiotic tolerance is still valid (Fig. 1, Figs. S3 and S4). We believe that the most appropriate course of action is to retract the paper. We offer our sincerest apologies to the scientific community for these inadvertent errors and for any inconvenience they may have caused.”
1. Harms A, Fino C, Sørensen MA, Semsey S, Gerdes K (2017) Prophages and growth dynamics confound experimental results with antibiotic-tolerant persister cells. MBio 8:e01964-17.