About the Authors

Shiping Zhang

Affiliation Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, Cincinnati, Ohio, United States of America

Yi Chen

Affiliation Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, Cincinnati, Ohio, United States of America

Eric Potvin

Affiliation Centre de Recherche sur la Fonction Structure et Ingenierie des Proteines, Universite Laval, Ste-Foy, Quebec, Canada

Francois Sanschagrin

Affiliation Centre de Recherche sur la Fonction Structure et Ingenierie des Proteines, Universite Laval, Ste-Foy, Quebec, Canada

Roger C Levesque

Affiliation Centre de Recherche sur la Fonction Structure et Ingenierie des Proteines, Universite Laval, Ste-Foy, Quebec, Canada

Francis X McCormack

Affiliation Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, Cincinnati, Ohio, United States of America

Gee W Lau

To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: gee.lau@uc.edu

Affiliation Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, Cincinnati, Ohio, United States of America

Competing Interests

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Author Contributions

SZ, YC, FXM, and GWL conceived and designed the experiments. SZ, YC, FS, and GWL performed the experiments. SZ, YC, FS, FXM, and GWL analyzed the data. EP, FS, RCL, FXM, and GWL contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools. GWL wrote the paper.