Last year it was just a rumor, but yesterday Retraction Watch covered an official retraction from a neuroscience lab at Hopkins. The retraction notice:

Our paper reported an analysis of a mouse genetic model that deletes the C terminus of Shank3 to mimic human mutations that cause autism spectrum disorder. Figure panels for several polyubiquitination assays were improperly assembled, leading to multiple repetitions of bands in western blots of the lysates. These errors did not affect the quantitative analysis of polyubiquitination because this analysis was performed as described and was not dependent on representative western blot images. In light of the figure preparation issues, we feel that the most responsible course of action is to retract the paper. We sincerely apologize to the scientific community for any misunderstanding that these errors may have caused.

Well done for preventing the spread of misinformation. It must hurt to issue a retraction, but it sounds like the conclusions still stand regardless of the “improper assembly” of the representative Western blots. When are we going to learn to stop trusting Western blots in papers?