Notice of RetractionAn efficient method for preparing alga “seeds” for artificial cultivation from dry sample of Nostoc flagelliforme using liquid nitrogen

Notice of Retraction

After careful and considered review of the content of this paper by a duly constituted expert committee, this paper has been found to be in violation of IEEE´s Publication Principles.

We hereby retract the content of this paper. Reasonable effort should be made to remove all past references to this paper.

The presenting author of this paper has the option to appeal this decision by contacting TPII@ieee.org.

Nostoc flagelliforme, which grows in arid or semiarid steppes of the west and westnorthern parts of China, has a potential application in the ecological restoration of the damaged ecosystem in there. The reducing and slowly grown material is potentially the main limiting factor for the scale-up cultivation and application of it. In this paper, to prepare as many short vegetative filaments as possible to serve as alga “seeds” for artificial cultivation, a new method was attempted by gently crushing liquid-nitrogen frozen dry sample of N. flagelliforme. The results showed that moderately air-dried samples of N. flagelliforme (around 13% water content) could be directly subjected to treat by liquid nitrogen to produce living filaments and the number of them is at least twice to four times than that obtained by conventional cutting by scissors. In short, this new method of treating N. flagelliforme with liquid nitrogen would be a good solution to the sourcing of enough alga “seeds” for the future scale-up cultivation and application.