Retracted structures

The paper:

C. Reyes et al., "Structure of the ABC transporter MsbA in complex with ADP vanadate and lipopolysaccharide," Science, 308:1028-31, 2005. (Cited in 79 papers)

The finding:

In 2001, researchers led by Geoffrey Chang of the Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, Calif. used X-ray crystallography to model the structure of an ATP binding cassette transporter - the bacterial MsbA. After four years, research in the field continued to build on those results, including this Hot Paper, which resolves the structure at 4.2 Å and proposes a "flip-flop" theory of lipid transport through the MsbA.

The suspicions:

Five of Chang's papers on the MsbA structure have been cited more than 720 times. Some research, however, has cast doubt on the validity of Chang's original results; the structures seemed unlikely based on homolog structures and biochemical data. "We looked at [Chang's structure] and knew it was wrong but couldn't prove...