Voinnet’s CNRS investigator Catherine Jessus with own data integrity issues

More suspected data manipulations in the papers by the French elite biologists. It was funny enough when the director and several lead figures at the Strasbourg CNRS institute for plant sciences IBMP, former home of the master data manipulator Olivier Voinnet, and even the institute’s evaluators, were found to sport quite a lot of shifty-looking data in their papers. This time, the irony is just too much. Catherine Jessus, developmental biologist specialising on cell cycle research on oocytes and director of CNRS l’Institut des sciences biologiques (INSB) was in charge of two misconduct cases, and now the data integrity of her own papers is called in question. One investigation led by Jessus was about, whom else, Voinnet and his IBMP sidekick Patrice Dunoyer. In summer 2015, Voinnet was barred from CNRS for 2 years (which sounds worse than it is, because his professorship at ETH Zürich in Switzerland remained untouched, read here), and Dunoyer was suspended for one entire month. Jessus’ secret investigation ended with no documents whatsoever but a terse press release made available to outsiders. Both Voinnet and Dunoyer are by now back to publishing papers in prestigious journals.

Jessus was also in charge of dealing with the misconduct evidence against Voinnet’s former postdoc Charles-Henri Lecellier, whom the mighty plant scientist (according to my sources) banned from his Strasbourg lab because he did not trust his research results. It seems Lecellier started to fudge data already during his PhD at CNRS Hôpital Saint-Louis in Paris (PubPeer record here). Imagine how bad it must get that Voinnet expels you for data manipulation! The tenured CNRS researcher was hence moved out of Voinnet’s sight, to work as group leader at the Institut de Génétique Moléculaire de Montpellier, where he continued his own line of data rigging, helped by his trusted friend from IBMP, Guillaume Vetter (see my earlier reporting for a German magazine here and here). Apparently, with full protection from CNRS: in 2013 Jessus actively opposed on behalf of CNRS the impending retraction of a Lecellier co-authored paper, despite earlier misconduct findings against his partner Vetter at the University of Luxembourg (evidence here, especially this letter, example of data manipulations here).

The university’s and last author’s requests of retraction to the NPG journal Oncogene were initially overruled by Lecellier’s and Jessus’ insistence to issue a correction instead, but the paper Vetter et al 2010 was eventually pulled in December 2015 following my reporting. Nothing at all happened to other problematic papers by Lecellier, one of most troublesome of which was Saumet et al 2008, where real-time PCR data was selectively “modified” to accommodate peer reviewer criticisms (see highlighted changes here and Lecellier’s originally submitted manuscript here). The journal Blood, published by American Society of Hematology, ignored all that evidence, and so did CNRS and Jessus.

Now, I was presented with some evidence of inappropriate data handling in Jessus’ own papers. It doesn’t look like the “mistakes” were accidental, whoever did them. Does this explain Jessus’ understanding stance towards Lecellier and Voinnet?

I wrote to her, but just as my Voinnet inquiries over 2 years ago, I received no reply. There is only one way to resolve this: Olivier Voinnet, whose ban from CNRS has now expired, should return and investigate Catherine Jessus, to complete the circle.

So here are four Jessus papers, and the evidence I was forwarded.

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1. A. Karaiskou, C. Jessus, T. Brassac, R. Ozon

Phosphatase 2A and polo kinase, two antagonistic regulators of cdc25 activation and MPF auto-amplification
J Cell Sci 1999 112: 3747-3756

Update 6.09.2017. This new evidence regarding Karaiskou et al 1999 was forwarded to me by another reader of my site. The first author Anthi Karaiskou is now  associate professor at Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris.

2. Anthi Karaiskou, Anne-Claire Leprêtre, Golbahar Pahlavan, David Du Pasquier, René Ozon, Catherine Jessus

Polo-like kinase confers MPF autoamplification competence to growing Xenopus oocytes
Development 2004 131: 1543-1552; doi: 10.1242/dev.01050

Update 6.09.2017. This new evidence regarding Karaiskou et al 2004 was forwarded to me by another reader of my site:

Update 7.09.2017. Another one from that concerned reader:

Update 10.09.2017. This came from yet another reader of my site:

3. Zhao Y, Haccard O, Wang R, Yu J, Kuang J, Jessus C, Goldberg ML.

Roles of Greatwall kinase in the regulation of cdc25 phosphatase.

Mol Biol Cell. 2008 doi: 10.1091/mbc.E07-11-1099.