Abstract
This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy). This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief and the authors. The journal was initially contacted by the corresponding author to request the retraction of the article as the results were reportedly not reproducible post-publication. Further investigation by the journal revealed also that the author name Hailin Liu was added to the authorship without editorial approval, after the article was accepted by the handling Editor. Other authorship issues as well as data realiability issues with the article were further revealed by the institutional investigation: http://med.china.com.cn/content/pid/291148/tid/1013/iswap/1. Given the concerns raised regarding panels from Figure 3A and also the comments of Dr Elisabeth Bik regarding this article “This paper belongs to a set of over 400 papers (as per February 2020) that share very similar Western blots with tadpole-like shaped bands, the same background pattern, and striking similarities in title structures, paper layout, bar graph design, and - in a subset - flow cytometry panels”, the journal requested the authors to provide the raw data. However, the authors were not able to fulfil this request and therefore the Editor-in-Chief decided to retract the article.
