Bizarre chemical structure sinks paper five years later
By 
Katrina Krämer2018-07-17T10:02:00
In a detective story of a retraction, an antimicrobial compound’s eyebrow-raising structure led to allegations of image manipulation
Three years after an unlikely structure first set off chemists’ alarm bells, a study describing a natural product with antibacterial properties has been retracted amid concerns over doctored images.
The paper, published in 2013 in the peer-reviewed open access journal PLoS One, was first picked up by chemistry blogger See Arr Oh in 2015. He was taken aback by the strange chemical structure Xinqing Zhao from Dalian University of Technology, China, and his team had proposed for the marine bacterial alkaloid xinghaiamine A.