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How’s this for a demonstration of how science builds in incremental steps, on the efforts of others? And, sadly, how cracks in the foundation have effects further up in the edifice.

In 2005, the laboratories of Fred Ausubel and Jorge Vivanco, at Harvard and Colorado State University respectively, published a paper in Nature, Mediation of pathogen resistance by exudation of antimicrobials from roots^{10.1038/nature03356}. Essentially, they showed that metabolites from the roots of our old friend Arabidopsis were released into growth media, protecting the plant from a wide range of bacterial pathogens, while a particular strain of Pseudomonas syringae was (partially) resistant and able to infect the plant, causing disease.

Unfortunately, the paper was retracted in March this year. The reason for this is an interesting one: the collaborators used a panel of ten compounds reportedly exuded by Arabidopsis to monitor the plant’s defence response. These compounds were described in an earlier paper from the Vivanco lab, Metabolic profiling of root exudates of Arabidopsis thaliana published in J Agric Food Chem in 2003^{10.1021/jf021166h}. That paper was “corrected” (retracted, actually) in 2009, because experimental data had apparently “been lost.” But this made the later Nature paper untenable: “the validity of the use of the ten compounds as markers of the Arabidopsis defence response is now in doubt” (^{10.1038/nature09809}).

Sometimes, it all looks like a house of cards.

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You can read more about this particular case at Retraction Watch.