Retraction:

Hongxin Dong¹, Mengyi Zhu², Liping Meng¹, Yan Ding², Ding Yang², Shanshan Zhang¹, Wenan Qiang³, Daniel W. Fisher⁴, Eugene Yujun Xu²,

¹ Departments of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, IL 60611, USA
² State Key Laboratory of Reproductive Medicine, Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, 211166, P. R. China
³ Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, IL 60611, USA
⁴ Department of Neurology, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, IL 60611, USA

Published: October 16, 2025

Copyright: © 2025 Braidy et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

This article has been retracted: Our Image Forensics analysis ​revealed Western blot image duplications in Figures 1A, 3A, 4A, and 5A. Specifically, some bands in different Western blots in Figure 1A ​appear to be the same, Synaptophysin blot is duplicated as Bcl1 blot in Figure 3A, b-actin blot is duplicated in Figure 4A as Akt blot and p-CaMKIIα bands are duplicated in APP blot in Figure 5A. In Figure 4A the b-actin bands were found in b-actin blot in Figure 5A. ​We also identified an external duplication where the SNAP25 blot in Figure 1A was reproduced as the GAPDH blot in Figure 5B of an unrelated paper published later [1]. The corresponding author Professor Guillemin has acknowledged these duplications and requested the retraction ​if the first author, Dr. Braidy, who performed all the Western blots in his laboratory at UNSW, could not provide supporting materials.​ ​Furthermore, both universities, where the research was conducted, initiated their own investigations. Macquarie University concluded that Professor Guillemin's contributions ​to the paper​ did not meet their authorship threshold ​according to the Macquarie University Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research and requested his name be removed. ​The second request to withdraw authorship was received from Professor Perminder Sachdev, who stated that his “involvement in this paper was restricted to commenting on a near final version of the draft from a clinical perspective, upon request by Dr Braidy, first author.” The UNSW ​Conduct & Integrity Office also began an investigation but has not yet provided an update or responded to the journal's inquiries. Consequently, based on the findings of multiple WB duplications, ​the absence of supporting data from the first author, Dr Braidy, and issues with authorships, the editorial decision has been made to retract this paper. The corresponding author Dr. Guillemin agreed with the retraction, but the rest of the authors either did not respond directly or could not be reached.

REFERENCES

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Original article: Oncotarget. 2016; 7:64589–64604. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18632/oncotarget.10905.