A former postdoctoral fellow at Washington State University has reportedly falsified data presented in two figures of an epigenetics paper, according to the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) linkurl:report;http://ori.hhs.gov/misconduct/cases/Chang_Hung-Shu.shtml released late last month.
Image:flickr/muhbabyfish
The data fabrication resulted in the retraction of a 2006 __Endocrinology__ linkurl:paper,;http://endo.endojournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/147/12/5524 but a repeat of the original study, which uses newer and more quantitative technology and confirms the paper's conclusions, will be published next week in __PLoS ONE__. "This was an extremely difficult issue for myself and the laboratory to deal with," said linkurl:Michael Skinner,;http://skinner.wsu.edu/ a professor of reproduction and environmental epigenetics at WSU who headed the research. According to the ORI's report, Hung-Shu Chang, a visiting postdoc from Taiwan who worked in Skinner's lab from 2005 to 2006, falsified sequencing data used to identify DNA regions in rat sperm cells that had different methylation patterns following treatment with an endocrine disruptor known as vinclozolin....
H.S. Chang, et al., "Transgenerational epigenetic imprinting of the male germline by endocrine disruptor exposure during gonadal sex determination," Endocrinology, 147:5524-41, 2006



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