Ahuja M, Lavania M, Singh I, Turankar RP, Chhabra S, Narang T, Dogra S, Sengupta U. Infection and Drug Resistance. 2018:11;1677–1683.
The Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of the Infection and Drug Resistance journal wishes to retract the published article.
Concerns were raised about the data presented in the published article and a review was initiated. The review highlighted some potential issues relating to misinterpretation of results which led to the incorrect conclusions about the identity of Mycobacterium lepromatosis. Each of the four 16S rRNA sequences described in the study were supplied by the authors and reanalysed. None of the four sequences returned the highest match with M. lepromatosis and one sequence, CH4, returned a positive match for Corynebacterium casei. It was also observed that the three M. lepromatosis 16S rRNA sequences obtained from GenBank (EU203590, GQ900372, GQ900374) were homologous and shared the same phylogeny. However, this was not indicated in the article.
Each of the three hemN sequences described in the study were also supplied by the authors and reanalyzed. None of the sequences returned the highest match with M. lepromatosis and two of the sequences (CH7 and CPH570) returned a close match with human DNA suggesting possible contamination of either the tissue sample or PCR reaction.
The authors were asked to provide an explanation for these findings but were unable to provide a satisfactory response. It was therefore determined the findings and conclusions presented in the article were not supported.