PIXABAY, GERALTAdministrators at two universities in China are asking a journal to retract a study in which researchers reported controlling cells using a magnetic receptor. As Nature News reported today (September 21), the investigator who first discovered the receptor—and has a paper in press about it— is alleging that his colleague used his data and the protein to publish a paper this month, violating their agreement to wait until the paper describing the receptor came out.
“I never really worried about it because we all agreed that the paper determining the protein should be first,” Xie Can, a biophysicist at Peking University, told Nature News.
Xie cried foul about a publication by Zhang Sheng-jia, a neuroscientist at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Zhang’s work, published September 14 in Science Bulletin, describes a method of expressing the magnetoreceptor in cultured cells and applying a magnetic field to control cellular activity. “We envision a new age of magnetogenetics is coming,” Zhang and his colleagues wrote in their report.
Xie said that he was willing to share the receptor with Zhang, under the condition that Xie’s paper would take precedence. Zhang countered that Xie had agreed not to share the receptor with anyone else, and ...
