What’s all the hype about retracting a Nature paper?

  A highly cited Nature paper that identified a long-sought receptor critical for mediating plant response to stress is being retracted after researchers were unable to reproduce the results. (The Scientist)

The paper in question was the first to identify a receptor for abscicic acid (ABA), which regulates plant stress response. It has been cited some 120 times since its publication in 2006. Scientific experiments are not exact nor always produce results that are set in stone. Even the cleanest and best experiments will find changes in the future as methods and technology improve. But that’s the nature of science. We discover something new and report it, and other scientists test our methods and results. Now I suppose citing the retracted Nature paper is not a real problem unless future studies relied on the assumption that this one paper was correct. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what the problem was.

"It obviously put a big dent in what we’re doing," said corresponding author Robert Hill. "It’s meant that we’ve had to go back and reinterpret data." One graduate student has had to "chop a publication" which was based on the assumption that the ABA receptor was real. "I’ve come to reconcile with the problem," said Hill, adding that he is working to correct it "without hurting too many people."

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