The journal and the authors retract the article “Formation of Proto-Kranz in C3 Rice Induced by Spike-Stalk Injection Method” [1] cited above.
Following publication, concerns were brought to the attention of the editors regarding experimental results from [1] that were found to be unreliable, namely: (1) Several sorghum genes were integrated into the rice genome; (2) Sorghum PPDK and PEPCK genes were expressed in the sorghum–rice (SR) plant; (3) Integration of sorghum DNA caused proto-Kranz anatomy. This has brought about uncertainty regarding the scientific conclusions.
In accordance with our ethics procedures, an investigation was conducted. The authors have not been able to provide a satisfactory explanation for these irregularities and the journal’s Editors-in-Chief no longer has confidence in the conclusions of the paper. Therefore, to ensure the addition of only high-quality scientific works to the field of scholarly publication, this paper [1] is retracted and shall be marked accordingly. The authors agree with this retraction.
We apologize to our readership that this went undetected until now.
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Reference
- 1.Jiang D., Wang F., Zhang H., Gao W., Tong X., Lv C., Chen G. Formation of Proto-Kranz in C3 Rice Induced by Spike-Stalk Injection Method. Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2021;22:4305. doi: 10.3390/ijms22094305. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar] [Retracted]