A 14-year-old newspaper has received expressions of concern after an anonymous whistleblower found evidence of image duplication in the work.
The authors have had images of several other articles flagged on PubPeer. The corresponding author, Kelly McMasters, is chair of the Hiram C. Polk, Jr., MD, Department of Surgery at the University of Louisville School of Medicine in Kentucky.
The 2010 article, “Adenovirus-mediated expression of truncated E2F-1 suppresses tumor growth in vitro and in vivo,” appeared in Cancer. It has been cited 12 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
The expression of concern highlights “the suspicion of duplication of elements between figures 2b and 2c”.
The author (sic) admitted that errors were made during the preparation of the figures; however, since the paper was published in 2010, they were unable to provide the original raw data for Figure 2c. Although the conclusions are not believed to have been affected, the journal issues this expression of concern to alert readers that the blots in Figure 2c were inappropriately modified without disclosing the processing in the figure caption.
McMasters did not respond to our request for comment.
Carissa Gilman, director of editorial operations at Cancersaid Retraction clock An “anonymous whistleblower” expressed concerns about the article via email. The person “said they had received help from ImageTwin, an image integrity analysis tool,” Gilman told us.
Despite the inappropriate image modification, Gilman told us that the editors “did not believe we had enough evidence that the article should be retracted.”
The magazine uses expressions of concern “if there are issues that we believe cannot be resolved,” the representative continued. “In this case, since the original stain cannot be found, we cannot satisfactorily resolve this issue.”
A January 2024 PubPeer comment on “Actinopolyspora biskrensis” on the 2010 paper points out possible signal duplications and gel slices in the figures mentioned in the notice, as well as possible differential splicing between gel lanes.
Lead author Jorge Gomez-Gutierrez, an associate professor at the University of Missouri School of Medicine in Columbia, Missouri, was unable to find the original stains “given the age of the paper,” Gilman said.
Gomez-Gutierrez “agreed that the actin bands were inadvertently duplicated during the preparation of the figure,” but stands by the paper “since they have been able to reproduce the same results in the intervening years multiple times using different cell lines,” according to Gilman. He did not respond to our request for comment.
McMasters has several other papers with PubPeer commentary, including a second paper from 2010, “Development of adenoviral vectors encoding therapeutic genes toxic to host cells: comparison of binary and monoinducible vectors expressing truncated E2F-1.” Actinopolyspora pointed out the image overlay in Figure 3C of the paper.
Gómez-Gutiérrez responded on PubPeer with original images. However, a second commenter, “Nerita vitiensis,” created an animation that “only confirms that Actinopolyspora biskrensis “I was right: the images do indeed overlap.”
A second article in Virology has comments on PubPeer pointing out image manipulation. Actinopolyspora noted in January that “two images in Figure 6D appear to overlap, but are described differently.”
A spokesperson for Elsevier, the publisher of Virology, has confirmed that The papers in Virology PubPeer comments are currently “under investigation.”
In April, MDPI magazine Cancers published a correction for “Temozolomide Enhances Triple-Negative Breast Cancer Virotherapy In Vitro,” a 2018 paper for which Gomez-Gutierrez and McMasters are corresponding authors.
The correction refers to an “error” in Figure 1A of the paper, again following a comment by Actinopolyspora on PubPeer. According to the correction, “the image of a crystal violet plate of MDA-MB-231 cells was inadvertently duplicated from a previous manuscript,” but “a new set of experiments was performed to replace the duplicated crystal violet plate and generate a new quantification graph.”
Other Cancers The McMasters and Gomez-Gutierrez paper contains PubPeer comments about possible image manipulation. MDPI did not respond to our request for comment about plans to investigate further.
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