A Brazilian author whose attorneys were the first to send the now-shuttered Science Fraud site a cease-and-desist letter has now had a paper retracted.

As Retraction Watch readers may know, Science Fraud shut down earlier this week in response to legal threats. Those threats were preceded by a cease-and-desist letter last month from attorneys for Rui Curi, of the University of Sao Paulo.

Curi’s work had been scrutinized by Science Fraud in a number of posts, with allegations of duplicated bands and re-used Western blots. With a gnawing suspicion that some of our more erudite readers will take issue with our use of “irony” here, we note that “Regulation of interleukin-2 signaling by fatty acids in human lymphocytes,” by one Rui Curi and colleagues, has now been retracted by the Journal of Lipid Research.

There is no retraction notice on the paper, originally published in 2007, but the PDF is watermarked “Withdrawn, December 28, 2012.”

It has has been cited 15 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.

We’ve contacted the editors of the journal, and the corresponding author of the paper, about why the paper was retracted, and will update with anything we learn.

Update, 11:15 a.m. Eastern, 1/6/13: The publisher of the JLR, the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, tells us the paper was “withdrawn by author” and recommended we contact the authors for more information. The ASBMB, as Retraction Watch readers may recall, also publishes the Journal of Biological Chemistry, which we’ve taken to task numerous times for its opaque notices but recently hired a manager of publication ethics — a move we hope could mean they’re considering changing this policy.

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