Retraction: Long noncoding RNA HOTAIR promotes cell apoptosis by sponging miR-221 in Parkinson’s disease

Abstract

Retraction of ‘Long noncoding RNA HOTAIR promotes cell apoptosis by sponging miR-221 in Parkinson’s disease’ by Fan Zhou et al., RSC Adv., 2019, 9, 29502–29510, DOI: 10.1039/C9RA06107J.

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The Royal Society of Chemistry hereby wholly retracts this RSC Advances article due to concerns with the reliability of the data. The images in the article were screened by an image integrity expert. All of the western blot bands are over-contrasted, have no visible background and may not be genuine. Furthermore, the western blots and many other features of the article were found to be unexpectedly similar to western blots and features in a number of other papers with no overlapping authors.

In addition, the paper was analysed by experts who fact-checked the identities of the described nucleotide sequence reagents,¹ and found errors with the following nucleotide sequence reagents reported in the article: human miR-221 forward and reverse primers, and mouse miR-221 forward and reverse primers. Therefore, the results shown in Fig. 3 and 5 are unreliable.

The authors were asked to provide the raw data for this article, but did not respond. Given the significance of the concerns about the validity of the data, and the lack of raw data, the findings presented in this paper are not reliable.

The authors have been informed but have not responded to any correspondence regarding the retraction.

Signed: Laura Fisher, Executive Editor, RSC Advances.

Date: 15^th January 2021.

References

1. C. Labbé, N. Grima, T. Gautier, B. Favier and J. A. Byrne, PLoS One, 2019, 14(3), e0213266.

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