A search for a narrow baryonic state in the and system has been performed in ep collisions at HERA with the ZEUS detector using an integrated luminosity of taken in 2003–2007. The search was performed with deep inelastic scattering events at an ep centre-of-mass energy of for exchanged photon virtuality, Q2, between 20 and . Contrary to evidence presented for such a state around 1.52 GeV in a previous ZEUS analysis using a sample of 121 pb−1 taken in 1996–2000, no resonance peak was found in the invariant-mass distribution in the range 1.45–1.7 GeV. Upper limits on the production cross section are set.