After 18 months of complex testing and retesting, Pamela Ronald became certain that she needed to retract two high-profile papers on disease resistance in rice. The hardest part, says Ronald, a crop scientist at the University of California, Davis, was staying calm - she worried about the implications for current and past lab members and about others spending time replicating potentially faulty work. The papers had claimed to identify a bacterial protein that could activate an immune response in rice plants with a specific receptor. But when new members of her team were unable to reproduce the results, alarm bells started ringing.
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