Fig. 9From: Effects of cigarette smoke on barrier function and tight junction proteins in the bronchial epithelium: protective role of cathelicidin LL-37Effects of LL-37 on gene expression levels for occludin, ZO-1, and E-cadherin in Calu-3 cells. Cells were pretreated with or without 20 μg/ml LL-37 and then exposed to 10% CSE. RNA was extracted at the indicated times after CSE exposure and real-time quantitative reverse-transcriptase PCR analyses were performed. The target gene expression levels were normalized by β-actin expression and presented as means ± SEM (n = 4–8 per group). All results are representative of at least two independent experiments. *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001, by two-way ANOVABack to article page