The authors show our thanks to Professor Gruenert from the University of California, San Francisco for the gift of the immortalized human bronchial epithelial cell line 16HBE14O.This work was supported by the grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 30670915 and No. 30800504), and the Key Projects (No. 2007FJ3009) from Hunan Science and Technology Plans.
The shedding of airway epithelial cells and loss of epithelial functional homeostasis are major pathological characteristics of asthma; however, the mechanism underlying these pathologies remains obscure. Our previous...