About the Authors

Shreeram C. Nallar

Contributed equally to this work with: Shreeram C. Nallar, Limei Lin

Affiliation Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of Maryland School of Medicine, University of Maryland Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Cancer Center, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America

Limei Lin

Contributed equally to this work with: Shreeram C. Nallar, Limei Lin

Affiliation Cancer Biology track Graduate Program in Life Sciences, University of Maryland School of Medicine, University of Maryland Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Cancer Center, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America

Varsha Srivastava

Affiliation Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of Maryland School of Medicine, University of Maryland Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Cancer Center, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America

Padmaja Gade

Affiliation Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of Maryland School of Medicine, University of Maryland Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Cancer Center, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America

Edward R. Hofmann

Affiliation Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of Maryland School of Medicine, University of Maryland Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Cancer Center, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America

Hafiz Ahmed

Affiliation Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Maryland School of Medicine, University of Maryland Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Cancer Center, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America

Sekhar P. Reddy

Affiliation Department of Pediatrics, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, United States of America

Dhananjaya V. Kalvakolanu

dkalvako@umaryland.edu

Affiliation Cancer Biology track Graduate Program in Life Sciences, University of Maryland School of Medicine, University of Maryland Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Cancer Center, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America

Competing Interests

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Author Contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: SCN LL DVK. Performed the experiments: SCN LL VS. Analyzed the data: SCN LL VS DVK. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: ERH HA. Wrote the paper: SCN DVK. Designed the RNAi studies with lentiviral shRNAs and conducted those experiments: PG. Participated in the design of certain experiments and discussion in the paper: SPR.