Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine has retracted the article titled “Effect of Rat Medicated Serum Containing Zuo Gui Wan and/or You Gui Wan on the Differentiation of Stem Cells Derived from Human First Trimester Umbilical Cord into Oocyte-Like Cells In Vitro” [1], due to indications of image manipulation and duplication as raised on PubPeer [2].
The western blots in Figure 5 show signs of duplication and other manipulation. In Figure 2, the 0 day panel in (a) was duplicated in the 0 day panel in (b).
The authors provided a corrected image for the 0 day panel for 2(b) and provided high-resolution images showing no duplication in Figure 3(b) in the DAPI panels (see the supplementary materials). However, the original images for the western blots in Figure 5 were not available.
Supplementary Materials
Corrected image for the 0 day panel for 2(b) and provided high-resolution images showing no duplication in Figure 3(b) in the DAPI panels. (Supplementary Materials)