RETRACTION: KIF15 Promotes Proliferation and Growth of Hepatocellular Carcinoma

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RETRACTION: Y.-F. Sun, H.-L. Wu, R.-F. Shi, L. Chen, and C. Meng. “KIF15 Promotes Proliferation and Growth of Hepatocellular Carcinoma,” Analytical Cellular Pathology 2020, no. 1 (2020): 1–9, https://doi.org/10.1155/2020/6403012.

The above article, published online on 3 April 2020 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com), has been retracted by agreement between the journal Editor-in-Chief, Dimitrios Karamichos; and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

The retraction has been agreed following an investigation of the concerns raised by Hoya camphorifolia on PubPeer [1], which identified multiple instances of figure duplication.

Specifically:

• • Figure 1b: The images representing the expression of KIF15 are identical to the images claiming to represent the expression of KIF2C in Figure 2b of [2].
• • Figure 3d: The Western Blot bands corresponding to AK4 and β-actin expression in the MCF7 cells have been duplicated in 2 other papers (Figure 3b in [3] and Figure 2b in [4]), where they were labelled as other proteins and cell types.
• -Figure 4a: Some of the tumors appear identical to the tumors shown in Figure 6a of [5].
• -Figure 4c: The immunohistochemistry image of Ki-67 expression in KIF15 depleted tumor tissue has been duplicated in at least 3 other publications (Figure 4c (left) in [6], Figure 5d (right) in [7], and Figure 5b (left) in [8]), while being presented as images of different tumor types.

As a result of the investigation, the data and conclusions of this article are considered unreliable.

The authors were informed of the decision to retract the paper but did not provide a response.