Authors correct image errors in Neuron paper that challenged microglia-to-neuron conversion
A potential issue with the 2021 Neuron paper first surfaced in a PubPeer thread in December 2021. An anonymous commenter wrote that "the authors did not show a single positive image that their NeuroD1 virus actually infects microglia." Rao and Peng, authors of the paper, replied to the thread the same month, though that comment was not directed at the image errors that spurred the correction. They organized their own "academic integrity review" of their papers and discovered the issue with the figures.
Three supplementary figures in the paper, S3B, S2B and S5B, had issues with microscopy images, according to the 4 June 2025 correction notice. "We regret that, owing to insufficient rigor, several images in the supplementary figures contained obvious errors," Yanxia Rao assistant professor of neurology at Fudan University and first author on the paper.
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