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. 2017 Mar 9;8(3):e2657. doi: 10.1038/cddis.2017.78

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Copyright © 2017 The Author(s)

Cell Death and Disease is an open-access journal published by Nature Publishing Group. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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Schematic model of silica-induced pulmonary fibrosis. Silica causes increased expression of BBC3 in U937 cell-derived macrophages, which promotes autophagy by enhancing BAX expression and attenuating BCL2L1 expression. Autophagy is further aggravated by macrophage apoptosis and activation, leading to the release of cytokines from macrophages and the activation of fibroblasts into myofibroblasts. Myofibroblasts participate in the fibrotic process by proliferating, migrating and producing collagen