Fig. 4.

Inflammatory protein and cell signaling profiles of H292 cells exposed to 25% AqEs from 1R6F and RRP aerosols. (a) Heat maps showing MFI values of 20 inflammatory markers (left) and 17 phosphoproteins (right) normalized by subtracting background noise data from analysis of RPMI media or lysis buffer alone, respectively). (b) Volcano plots comparing MFI values between AqE-exposed and untreated cells for each test product category. Proteins showing significant fold-changes (higher than 1.5 or lower than −1.5) compared to the untreated control occur outside a pair of vertical black dotted lines and are highlighted in green and red to indicate increase and decrease, respectively. Proteins showing a tendency in fold change difference compared to the untreated control (higher than 1.2 or lower than −1.2) occur outside a pair of grey vertical dotted threshold lines and are highlighted in light green or light red respectively. Proteins with statistically significant changes compared to untreated control (p < 0.05, n=5, Mann-Whitney test) occur above the horizontal dotted black lines. Black dots correspond to proteins with statistically non-significant changes or with changes < 1.5 relative to untreated controls. (c) Concentration (pg/ml) of individual cytokines and MFI values of cell signaling phosphoproteins with > 1.5-fold change and p <0.05 from (b). Mean ± standard deviation from 5 independent replicates is presented. FC: fold change, *p<0.05, **p<0.01.