Fig. 1

Experimental design of ALI-PBEC study. Primary bronchial epithelial cell cultures were derived from resected lung tissue (n = 8) and differentiated at the air–liquid interface (ALI). Differentiated cultures were exposed once to whole cigarette smoke (CS) or Air and samples were collected at 1 h, 4 h and 24 h after exposure for RNA-sequencing and ELISA. Bioinformatics analysis was performed on the RNA-seq dataset. Incubator controls were kept untouched in the cell culture incubator during the whole procedure. DGE: differential gene expression, GSVA: gene set variation analysis, PBEC: primary bronchial epithelial cell, ALI: Air–liquid interface