Author Correction: Divalent Rab effectors regulate the sub-compartmental organization and sorting of early endosomes

Correction to: Nature Cell Biology https://doi.org/10.1038/ncb744, published online 14 January 2002.

In the version of this article published in 2002, there was a duplication in Fig. 2c brought to the authors’ attention through Pubpeer (https://pubpeer.com/publications/BD692C0077A6884E844360C7084CC1). A detailed evaluation of the figure shows that the right part of the image matching the top of lanes 1 and 2 is identical to a lower part of the image encompassing lanes 3 and 4.

The authors could recover neither the original autoradiographs nor the repeats of the experiment that were carried out at the time. They therefore repeated the experiment as done in the original paper. In 2022, the experiments were performed by Ramona Schaefer, who was not an author on the 2002 paper, with blinding, and under the supervision of an independent expert, Prof. Elisabeth Knust, at the authors’ institution, acting as ombudsperson. The experimental details and all gels obtained in 2022 for this correction are shown in a supplemental file appended to this correction.

The results obtained in 2022 confirm the original result that Rabenosyn-5 binds GST-Rab4:GTPγS and not GST-Rab11, with hardly any protein binding detected, as in the original Fig. 2c. A corrected panel is shown below (Fig. 1, as revised Fig. 2c). In addition, in vitro translated FIP3 was used as positive control for GST-Rab11 (Fig 2, as Supplementary Fig. 2c).

The authors add that the lack of binding of Rabenosyn-5 to Rab11, as demonstrated in Fig. 2c and by the repeats provided in this correction, was validated by the data of Fig. 4 of the original article using recombinant proteins and further confirmed in an independent study by Eathiraj et al. (Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/nature03798 (2005)).

The authors sincerely apologize for the duplication and conclude that the data presented in the original Fig. 2c are correct and reproducible. Fig. 2 in the HTML and PDF versions of the 2002 paper could not be corrected directly due to changes in production systems since 2002. This correction notice serves to correct the article. The corresponding author of the original article, M.Z., remains available for contact for details arising from the article and this amendment.

Fig. 1: Revised Figure 2c Rabenosyn-5 does not interact with Rab11.

³⁵S-methionine-labelled in vitro translated Rabenosyn-5 (lane 1) was incubated with GST-Rab11:GDP (lane 2), GST-Rab11:GTPγs (lane 3), GST-Rab4:GDP (lane 4), GST-Rab4:GTPγs (lane 5). Bound proteins were eluted and analysed by SDS–PAGE and autoradiography.