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Published online 10 December 2008 | Nature 456, 683 (2008) | doi:10.1038/456683a
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Plant hormone study pulled
Canadian lab retracts work on abscisic acid.
Two years ago, three papers1,2,3 made a splash in the plant biology world by identifying protein receptors for abscisic acid (ABA), a key hormone in plant physiology. This week, Nature is retracting one of those papers1 after reports that the work could not be replicated.
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... says Peter McCourt, an ABA specialist at the University of Toronto, Canada. But "none of it linked up with any of the genetics that had been done in the previous 20 years"." I wonder how the paper got through review especially given the rigor Nature follows. When other ABA specialists thought the link of Hill results with the ABA genetics of the past 20 yrs was weak, shouldn't this be a serious problem with the manuscript? How was it accepted? Or is it one of those situatons where anything that is coauthored by a big wig will get through but if it is a beginning researcher then he/she needs to be grilled and their manuscripts are not even reviewed by Nature. I wonder how many articles are out there in big journals that are unreliable! The first author gets the last laugh - so many citations and many more results that depended on this one are also questionable?
It's hard to imagine what's happening behind those papers from this report.But it's still good news for scientic researchers.Hoping telling the truth is more important than fame and wealth brought by papers.