Correction to: Nature Cell Biology https://doi.org/10.1038/s41556-018-0264-3, published online 21 January 2019

In the version of this Article originally published, several labels in Figs. 1b,e and 2c were incorrect. In the top HA-SMADs row of Fig. 1b, the ‘1’ should be a minus sign. In Fig. 1e, the top plus sign in the ‘in vitro’ column should read ‘n.d.’, and the bottom ‘n.d.’ label in the ‘co-IP’ column should be a minus sign. In fig. 2c, the middle plus sign in the top ‘His-SMAD4’ row should be a minus sign. Additionally, grant number ‘31730057’ was omitted from the Acknowledgements section. The last sentence of the section should read “This research was partly supported by grants from NSFC (31730057, 91540205, 31571447, 31090360), NIH (R21CA209007) and DoD (DAMD W81XWH-15-1-0650/0651), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities.” The errors have been corrected.