In the otherwise admirable research by Oh et al. (2014), an obvious error was noted. In this paper, Oh et al. (2014) mistook the chemical synthesized by the new constructed metabolic pathway as ‘2-butanol’. In fact, it should be ‘isobutanol’ (or more correctly, ‘2-methyl-1-propanol’). The authors thought that these two descriptions were the same. However, they are two different ‘butanol’ isomers (Ji et al. 2012; Smith and Liao 2011) (Fig 1).

Fig. 1
figure 1

The chemical structures of ‘2-butanol’ and ‘isobutanol’

Full size image

Therefore, the corresponding descriptions in the paper (Oh et al. 2014), both in title and text, are likely need to be revised to avoid misleading the readers.