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On Sat, 2006-12-23 at 13:32 -0500, Arun Malhotra wrote: > I was shocked to see the retraction in yesterday's issue of Science (Dec > 22, 2006) of several ABC transporter structures and papers from the > Chang lab, including three published in Science. The retraction says > that the structures have the wrong hand and topology due to an > "in-house" program that inverted the signs on the anomalous pairs. > > I have no expertise in ABC transporters, but were there warning signs in > the structures? Were red flags raised by PDB or the other servers such > as EDI, EDS, etc.? Looking at some of these papers, these are low > resolution structure and I see very high R/Rfree, but there must have > been other signs of problems as well. > > In the past few years, there have been almost no structures retracted > due to gross errors and the checks being used by structural biology > community seemed to working quite well - what can we learn from this > tragic and sad error ? > One thing we can learn is that a high-profile journal reporting on this fiasco (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/314/5807/1856 Science 22 December 2006:Vol. 314. no. 5807, pp. 1856 - 1857 DOI: 10.1126/science.314.5807.1856), after having accepted three such botched structures for publication, can find no room to criticise itself and other high-profile journals. I believe the race between Science, Nature and other top journals to get the hottest, sexiest articles has contributed to their overlooking the solidity of the underlying work. Cheers, -- ======================================================================= With the single exception of Cornell, there is not a college in the United States where truth has ever been a welcome guest - R.G. Ingersoll ======================================================================= David J. Schuller modern man in a post-modern world MacCHESS, Cornell University [EMAIL PROTECTED]
