About the Authors

Jana B. Ernst

Contributed equally to this work with: Jana B. Ernst, Armin Zittermann

Affiliation Clinic for Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery Heart and Diabetes Center North Rhine-Westphalia, Ruhr University Bochum, Bad Oeynhausen, Germany

Tobias Becker

‡ These authors also contributed equally to this work.

Affiliation Clinic for Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery Heart and Diabetes Center North Rhine-Westphalia, Ruhr University Bochum, Bad Oeynhausen, Germany

Joachim Kuhn

‡ These authors also contributed equally to this work.

Affiliation Institute for Laboratory and Transfusion Medicine, Heart and Diabetes Center North Rhine-Westphalia, Ruhr University Bochum, Bad Oeynhausen, Germany

Jan F. Gummert

‡ These authors also contributed equally to this work.

Affiliation Clinic for Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery Heart and Diabetes Center North Rhine-Westphalia, Ruhr University Bochum, Bad Oeynhausen, Germany

Armin Zittermann

Contributed equally to this work with: Jana B. Ernst, Armin Zittermann

azittermann@hdz-nrw.de

Affiliation Clinic for Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery Heart and Diabetes Center North Rhine-Westphalia, Ruhr University Bochum, Bad Oeynhausen, Germany

Competing Interests

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Author Contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: AZ. Performed the experiments: JBE JK. Analyzed the data: JBE TB AZ. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: JK JFG. Wrote the paper: JBE AZ.