Oncotarget

Retraction:

Retraction: MicroRNA-21 promotes TGF-β1-induced epithelial-mesenchymal transition in gastric cancer through up-regulating PTEN expression

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Oncotarget. 2025; 16:863-863. https://doi.org/10.18632/oncotarget.28789

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Chang Li1, Lei Song2, Zhuo Zhang3, Xiao-Xue Bai4, Ming-Fu Cui1, Lian-Jun Ma5

1 Department of Gastrointestinal Surgery, China-Japan Union Hospital of Jilin University, Changchun, 130000, Jilin, P.R. China
2 Department of Respiratory Medicine, The First Hospital of Jilin University, Changchun, 130000, Jilin, P.R. China
3 Department of Orthopaedics, China-Japan Union Hospital of Jilin University, Changchun, 130000, Jilin, P.R. China
4 Department of Cadre Ward, The First Hospital of Jilin University, Changchun, 130000, Jilin, P.R. China
5 Department of Endoscopics, China-Japan Union Hospital of Jilin University, Changchun, 130000, Jilin, P.R. China

Published: December 31, 2025

Copyright: © 2025 Li et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

This article has been retracted: Oncotarget has completed its investigation of this paper. After a correction notice was published for this article in 2020, correcting an image in Figure 4D, several additional problems were identified. Specifically, Figures 5 and 6 have a lack of background noise, questioning the authenticity of the data. Also, the ‘Blank’ and ‘Negative Control’ images in the ‘48 hr’ row of Figure 11B are identical. In Figure 10B, a western blot duplicates one found in Figure 4J of [1], which has since been retracted. Figure 9B duplicates a western blot also shown in Figure 6G of [2], also retracted. Immunohistochemistry images in Figure 2C (P-Akt) and 2E (Akt) were reproduced in the unrelated papers [3, 4], respectively. And b-actin western blot in Figure 5C appeared in the later published article [5]. Requests for signed documentation to confirm the retraction were sent to all authors, but no signatures have been received. In light of these findings, the editorial decision was made to retract this paper.


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Original article: Oncotarget. 2016; 7:66989–67003. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18632/oncotarget.11888.


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PII: 28789