Retracted: Tumor Protein D52-Like 2 Contributes to Proliferation of Breast Cancer Cells

Abstract

Cancer Biotherapy and Radiopharmaceuticals (CBR) is officially retracting the published article by Mei Yang, Xueyao Wang, Jiaoyuan Jia, Hongwen Gao, Peng Chen, Xianliang Sha, and Shan Wu entitled, “Tumor Protein D52-Like 2 Contributes to Proliferation of Breast Cancer Cells,” Cancer Biother Radiopharm February 2015, 30(1): 1–7. doi:10.1089/cbr.2014.1723. The editors of CBR received a letter from an investigator raising concerns regarding this published paper. Upon examining the 5′-GCGG... shRNA sequence described in the article, the investigator discovered that the lentiviral sequence cited to serve as a “non-silencing” control in fact shows homology to the human TPD52L2 gene (as per a Blastn search conducted by the investigator). The investigator claimed that the article therefore reported the results of knocking down the TPD52L2 gene as both the gene of interest and the supposed negative control. The investigator's concern was such that since the article employed an incorrect control lentiviral construct, the experimental results reported must be invalid. The editors of the CBR contacted the authors of the published paper who confirmed that the sequence was wrong which may have occurred due to a “copy paste error,” and agreed that the report could be misleading and agreed to retract the paper from the literature.