A 2024 paper by Wang Ertao's team published in Nature: the corresponding author acknowledged issues such as data anomalies and image duplication and applied for retraction; the team said it had reported the matter to its institution and launched an investigation, and the authors said that repeated experiments support the main conclusions.
Academic fraud-exposing blogger Geng Tongxue released a video pointing out that a rice immunity research paper, with Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University professor Wang Gang as co-first author, has problems including duplicated data, anomalous values, and repeated images; the corresponding author is Chinese Academy of Sciences researcher Wang Ertao.
Corresponding author Wang Ertao acknowledged on PubPeer that the source data contained duplicate values and anomalies, and that some images were duplicated. He proactively contacted the editorial office of Nature to apply for retraction, stating that the problematic data was generated by first author Wang Gang, and that original records could not be found for some of the data. The retraction process is scheduled to be completed in August 2026.