Abstract
Stem Cells and Development officially retracts the paper entitled, “Long-Term Maintenance of Undifferentiated Human Embryonic and Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells in Suspension,” by Mehran Rezaei Larijani, Ali Seifinejad, Behshad Pournasr, Vahid Hajihoseini, Seydeh-Nafiseh Hassani, Mehdi Totonchi, Maryam Yousefi, Farnaz Shamsi, Ghasem Hosseini Salekdeh, and Hossein Baharvand (Stem Cells Dev 2011; 20(11):1911-1923) due to concerns regarding replicated panels within Figure 3.
The Editor-in-Chief of Stem Cells and Development invited the corresponding author, Dr. Hossein Baharvand, to respond to the issues raised. Dr. Baharvand's response was as follows:
“The experiment related to Figure 3A has been performed more than 10 years ago in our laboratory and the paper has been published in 2011. Unfortunately, at this point, we could not retrieve the original gel images to investigate the source of this possible error. However, we stand by our statement regarding the maintained differentiation potential of these pluripotent stem cell lines under three-dimensional culture. Pluripotency was also separately confirmed with directed differentiation and expression of the markers in Figures 3B and 3C. Furthermore, the differentiation potential of these suspension-expanded human pluripotent stem cell lines has been shown in our other studies.
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Importantly, our conclusions remain unchanged regarding human pluripotent stem cell differentiation potential into three-germ layer derivatives using the proposed method. Finally, the data in figure 3A has no bearing on the main conclusion of our manuscript, that is our approach maintained the capability of freeze/thawing, karyotype stability, transcriptome, and pluripotency of hESCs and hiPSCs when expanded in stirred bioreactors.
The authors apologize to the community for the inconvenience this has caused and request that our article to be retracted to avoid any potential ambiguities in the future.”
Based on this explanation, the Editor of Stem Cells and Development agrees that the article requires retraction.
The Editor and Publisher of Stem Cells and Development are committed to preserving the scientific literature and the community it serves.