A paper which divided the biology community when it promised the possibility of taking rapid snapshots of enzyme activity has been retracted from Science by its authors.

Known as the ‘reactome array’, the device described by the paper would have been a huge boon to those looking at cell metabolism. But, shortly after the description was published in October last year, doubts emerged. Science published an ‘editorial expression of concern’ about the work in December and an institutional ethics committee investigation recommended it be withdrawn in July this year.

In this week’s edition of the journal, the authors write, “To our profound regret, peer inspection of the paper after publication revealed errors and omissions in the information provided on the chemistry underlying array compound synthesis, and the processing of array data obtained. … We apologize to Science, our institutions, and the scientific community for any inconvenience caused by our paper and its retraction.”

In an email to Nature, paper author Manuel Ferrer, of the CSIC Institute of Catalysis in Madrid, said that “well known international companies and laboratories have successfully used the metabolic array technology” and that his group was continuing to using it.

He also noted that a new paper will soon be sent out with “a complete analysis of the chemical synthesis and analysis of most representative molecules”.