About the Authors

Dongqing Zhu

Contributed equally to this work with: Dongqing Zhu, Shanshan Wang

Affiliations Department of Physiology, School of Medicine, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Carbondale, Illinois, United States of America, Department of Pharmacy, Jiangsu Food & Pharmaceutical Science College, Huai’an, Jiangsu Province, People’s Republic of China

Shanshan Wang

Contributed equally to this work with: Dongqing Zhu, Shanshan Wang

Affiliation Department of Physiology, School of Medicine, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Carbondale, Illinois, United States of America

John Lawless

Affiliation Department of Physiology, School of Medicine, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Carbondale, Illinois, United States of America

Jianchen He

zzheng@siu.edu (ZZ); hejc@shutcm.edu.cn(JH)

Affiliation School of Basic Medical Sciences, Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China

Zhengui Zheng

zzheng@siu.edu (ZZ); hejc@shutcm.edu.cn(JH)

Affiliation Department of Physiology, School of Medicine, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Carbondale, Illinois, United States of America

Competing Interests

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Author Contributions

Conceptualization: ZZ JH. Data curation: SW ZZ. Formal analysis: SW ZZ. Funding acquisition: ZZ. Investigation: DZ SW JL. Methodology: SW ZZ DZ. Resources: ZZ JH. Validation: DZ SW. Writing – original draft: DZ SW ZZ. Writing – review & editing: ZZ SW JL.