Fantastic Ca2+ "z-waves" fade out quietly

The first report that high speed Ca(2+) waves travel in a restricted zone around the cell periphery in a clockwise manner and which can only be revealed by very high speed imaging has been quietly retracted. In the original report, a single small region of high Ca(2+) was seen to spin around the cell periphery and around phagosomes formed within phagocytes in a manner unlike anything reported previously. This consequently caused a lot of interest. Several other papers reporting a similar phenomenon in a variety of cells were also published by the same lab and the phenomenon has been included in high profile reviews such as in Science. However, several groups have failed to reproduce this work and attempts to detect the Ca(2+) waves or the mechanism for their generation have failed. Now, the original report has been quietly retracted. In this short commentary, we give a brief account of the sorry story of the non-existent circulating Ca(2+) waves (z-waves) in the hope that the literature can be rectified and that future cell calcium biologists are not misled by these fantastic and spurious Ca(2+) reports.