Molecular insights into miRNA processing by Arabidopsis thaliana SERRATE

On 17 June 2011, NAR published the article ‘Molecular insights into miRNA processing by Arabidopsis thaliana SERRATE’ by Satoru Machida, Hong-Ying Chen, and Y. Adam Yuan (1).

The Editors were recently alerted by the first author, Dr Satoru Machida, that he could not reproduce the phenotype depicted in Figure 5A, image #6 labelled ‘se-1/myc-se core+N’.

Se-1/myc-se core+N is a T2 transformant expressing SERRATE amino acid residues 1–543 with N-terminal myc tag. The crystal structure presented in the article is from the structured core of SERRATE. The Authors reported the importance of the Zinc-finger domain. The issue brought to the editors’ attention concerns unstructured terminal regions and may therefore not affect the main conclusions of this article. However, an alternative interpretation could be that the non-structured regions of the SERRATE protein at N- and C-termini have different functions.

The Editors commend Dr Machida for being forthcoming and disclosing these concerns.

Keith R. Fox, Barry L. Stoddard

Senior Executive Editors