We replicated an experiment to evaluate cell proliferation of DU145, wild-type HCT116, and DicerEx5 HCT116 cells in response to siRNA-mediated silencing of the putative PTEN ceRNAs. This is similar to what was reported in Figure 5B of Tay et al., 2011 and described in Protocol 4 in the Registered Report (Phelps et al., 2016). Cells were transfected with siRNAs targeting the same putative PTEN ceRNAs as the original study. Knockdown efficiency, measured by RT-qPCR, revealed an average reduction in gene expression relative to control siRNA was 79% when considering all cell lines (Figure 4—figure supplement 1B). Proliferation activity was determined using the crystal violet assay starting the day after transfection with results presented as the difference in the values at the start of the timecourse for each condition (i.e. for each condition the value at the start of the timecourse was set to 0), similar to the original study. For DU145 cells, we found that siRNA-mediated depletion of VAPA or PTEN resulted in increased cell proliferation compared to cells transfected with control siRNA, while depletion of CNOT6L resulted in decreased cell proliferation (Figure 4, Figure 4—figure supplement 1A). The area under the curve (AUC) during the timecourse for each biological repeat was used to compare each condition to the control siRNA, which were not statistically significant (see Figure 4 legend). The original study reported siRNA-mediated targeting of VAPA, CNOT6L, or PTEN in DU145 cells resulted in a statistically significant increase in proliferation compared to control siRNA (Tay et al., 2011). The range of AUC values reported in the original study had a RSD for the control condition (26%) similar to this replication study (20%); however, the RSDs for the other conditions were much lower in the original study (VAPA = 4%; CNOT6L = 9%; PTEN = 7%) then this replication attempt (VAPA = 26%; CNOT6L = 20%; PTEN = 10%). As stated above this difference in variance between the original study and this replication attempt is a factor that could influence if statistical significance is reached.