No national body exists in Australia to handle research misconduct allegations. Each institution sets its own procedures in compliance with relevant state employment or anti-corruption laws.
Several months ago, I raised my concerns about Belinda Herring, a lecture at Department of Infectious Disease and Immunology, Sydney Medical School, Sydney University, for her research misconducts.

In particular, Belinda Herring misrepresented or falsified the bootstrap values used for testing the reliability of bootstrap trees, as those for testing phylogenetic relationships. She also misrepresented or falsified the bootstrap confidence intervals as ranges in the following 6 papers as well as her PhD thesis entitled “Molecular investigation of variation in HIV-1 genes”:

1. Herring BL, Tsui R, Peddada L, Busch M, Delwart EL (2005), Wide range of quasispecies diversity during primary hepatitis C virus infection, Journal of Virology 79(7): 4340-4346

http://jvi.asm.org/cgi/content/full/79/7/4340

2. Herring BL, Ge YC, Wang B, Ratnamohan M, Zheng F, Cunningham AL, Saksena NK, Dwyer DE (2003), Segregation of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 subtypes by risk factor in Australia, Journal of Clinical Microbiology 41(10):4600-4604

http://jcm.asm.org/cgi/content/full/41/10/4600

3. Herring BL, Cunningham AL, Dwyer DE (2004), Potential drug resistance polymorphisms in the integrase gene of HIV type 1 subtype A, AIDS Research and Human Retroviruses, 20(9):1010-1013

4. Herring BL, Bernardin F, Caglioti S, Stramer S, Tobler L, Andrews W, Cheng L, Rampersad S, Cameron C, Saldanha , Busch MP, Delwart E (2007), Polygenetic analysis of WNV in North American blood donors during the 2003-2004 epidemic seasons, Virology 363(1): 220-228

5. Tsui R, Herring BL, Barbour JD, Grant RM, Basshetti P, Kral A, Edlin BR, Delwart EL (2004), Human immunodeficiency virus type 1 superinfection was not detected following 215 years of infection drug user exposure, Journal of Virology 78(1): 94-103.

6. Herring BL, Page-Shafer K, Tobler LH, Delwart EL, Frequent hepatitis C virus superinfection in injection drug user, Journal of Infection Disease 190(8): 1396-1403.

Statistically, bootstrap is a way of testing the reliability of the dataset. It is the construction of pseudo-replicate datasets by re-sampling. Bootstrap enables us to evaluate whether or not the distribution of characters has been influenced by stochastic effects. In phylogenetic analyses, the pseudo-replicate datasets are generated by randomly sampling the original character matrix to generate new matrices of the sample size as the original. The frequency with which a given branch is found is recorded as the bootstrap proportion. These proportions can be used as a measure of the reliability of individual branches in the optimal tree. Therefore, bootstrap analysis is a statistical method for obtaining an estimate of error. It is used to assess the reliability of a tree, and is used to examine how often a particular cluster in a tree appears when nucleotides are re-sampled. There is no distance information in this tree. It can only tell use how reliable some groupings are.

If the entire data is compatible and has not been biased by stochastic effects, all bootstrap trees should in principal have the same topology. However, if the original dataset is biased, a cluster may be regarded as statistically significant, even if it is a wrong one!

To learn how to interpret bootstrap phylogenetic trees, we can refer a number of first-hand statistical papers; e.g.

1. Bootstrap confidence levels for phylogenetic trees, Efron B et al, Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1996 Jul 9;93(14):7085-90.
http://www.pnas.org/content/93/14/7085.full.pdf

2. Bootstrapping phylogenetic trees: Theory and Methods, Susan Holmes, Statistical Science, Volume 18, Issue 2 (2003), 241-255.
http://projecteuclid.org/DPubS?service=UI&version=1.0&verb=Display&handle=euclid.ss/1063994979
3. The CLUSTAL_X windows interface: flexible strategies for multiple sequence alignment aided by quality analysis tools, JD Thompson, TJ Gibson, F Plewniak, F Jeanmougin and DG Higgins, Nucleic Acids Research, Vol 25, Issue 24 4876-4882, Copyright © 1997 by Oxford University Press
http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/25/24/4876
4. Multiple sequence alignment with the Clustal series of programs, Ramu Chenna, Hideaki Sugawara, Tadashi Koike, Rodrigo Lopez, Toby J. Gibson, Desmond G. Higgins and Julie D. Thompson
http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/31/13/3497
Unfortunately, the Deputy Vice Chancellor Professor Jill Trewhella at the University of Sydney engaged in serious and systematic corruption with the aim of concealing Belinda Herring’s research misconducts. The Vice Chancellor Dr Michael Spence at the University of Sydney was a lawyer, and therefore he cannot understand anything about statistics and medical research. Yesterday, Jane Coulter, a staff at the University’s Audit and Risk Management made her hardest efforts to suggest me concealing Belinda Herring’s research misconduct.

It is really a pity!!!