Three Times the Charm?

A May 2010 Nature paper from the University of Chicago's Lina Chen and colleagues that reported that CD95 works to promote tumor growth has now been corrected three times, according to Ivan Oransky at Retraction Watch.

The first correction, issued online in March 2011, noted that an experimental error due to antibody cross-reactions affected their western blot analysis and that, after fixing the error, the result from that aspect of the study was no longer statistically significant. The second correction amended the first correction, saying the first letter contained the wrong panels.

Last week's correction says that the original article also included an incorrect actin blot and that some western blog data, which had been included as supplementary data, "were either misinterpreted or raw data could not be located." The researchers write that they repeated the experiment and were able to confirm their prior results. "All the conclusions of the original Letter are intact except for the data for the original Fig. 4f and g on the phosphorylation level of c-Jun and JNK in the livers of CD95-deficient mice, which have been corrected in two previous Corrigenda," the authors write. They add that first author Chen declined to sign the corrigenda.