This letter describes a newly discovered confounding effect of bacterial titer in a previously published type III delivery-based assay of the fungal effector BEC1019. The original publication (Whigham et al. 2015) has been retracted as a consequence of this discovery. Here, we tabulate the affected and unaffected figures and conclusions in the original publication and briefly reflect on potential pitfalls to bear in mind when designing experiments that use bacterial type III secretion to characterize eukaryotic effectors.