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Retraction of Pornillos et al., Science 310 (5756) 1950-1953. Retraction of Reyes and Chang, Science 308 (5724) 1028-1031. Retraction of Chang and Roth, Science 293 (5536) 1793-1800.

Science 22 December 2006:
Vol. 314. no. 5807, p. 1875
DOI: 10.1126/science.314.5807.1875b
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Letters

Retraction

We wish to retract our research article "structure of MsbA from E. coli: A homolog of the multidrug resistance ATP binding cassette (ABC) transporters" and both of our Reports "Structure of the ABC transporter MsbA in complex with ADP·vanadate and lipopolysaccharide" and "X-ray structure of the EmrE multidrug transporter in complex with a substrate" (1-3).

The recently reported structure of Sav1866 (4) indicated that our MsbA structures (1, 2, 5) were incorrect in both the hand of the structure and the topology. Thus, our biological interpretations based on these inverted models for MsbA are invalid.

An in-house data reduction program introduced a change in sign for anomalous differences. This program, which was not part of a conventional data processing package, converted the anomalous pairs (I+ and I-) to (F- and F+), thereby introducing a sign change. As the diffraction data collected for each set of MsbA crystals and for the EmrE crystals were processed with the same program, the structures reported in (1-3, 5, 6) had the wrong hand.

The error in the topology of the original MsbA structure was a consequence of the low resolution of the data as well as breaks in the electron density for the connecting loop regions. Unfortunately, the use of the multicopy refinement procedure still allowed us to obtain reasonable refinement values for the wrong structures.

The Protein Data Bank (PDB) files 1JSQ, 1PF4, and 1Z2R for MsbA and 1S7B and 2F2M for EmrE have been moved to the archive of obsolete PDB entries. The MsbA and EmrE structures will be recalculated from the original data using the proper sign for the anomalous differences, and the new Calpha coordinates and structure factors will be deposited.

We very sincerely regret the confusion that these papers have caused and, in particular, subsequent research efforts that were unproductive as a result of our original findings.

Geoffrey Chang
Department of Molecular Biology
The Scripps Research Institute
La Jolla, CA 92037, USA

Christopher B. Roth
Department of Molecular Biology
The Scripps Research Institute
La Jolla, CA 92037, USA

Christopher L. Reyes
Department of Molecular Biology
The Scripps Research Institute
La Jolla, CA 92037, USA

Owen Pornillos
Department of Molecular Biology
The Scripps Research Institute
La Jolla, CA 92037, USA

Yen-Ju Chen
Department of Molecular Biology
The Scripps Research Institute
La Jolla, CA 92037, USA

Andy P. Chen
Department of Molecular Biology
The Scripps Research Institute
La Jolla, CA 92037, USA

References

  1. G. Chang, C. B. Roth, Science 293, 1793 (2001).
  2. C. L. Reyes, G. Chang, Science 308, 1028 (2005).
  3. O. Pornillos, Y.-J. Chen, A. P. Chen, G. Chang, Science 310, 1950 (2005).
  4. R. J. Dawson, K. P. Locher, Nature 443, 180 (2006).
  5. G. Chang, J. Mol. Biol. 330, 419 (2003).
  6. C. Ma, G. Chang, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 101, 2852 (2004).




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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)