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. 2017 Mar 18;8(19):31601–31611. doi: 10.18632/oncotarget.16364

Figure 1. Azithromycin (AZM) augments rhinovirus-induced expression of IFNβ and RIG-I like helicases, while repressing viral infection exclusively in primary bronchial epithelial cells from asthmatic donors.

Figure 1

HBECs from asthma patients and healthy individuals were pre-treated with azithromycin for 24 h before infection with 1MOI RV16 and continuous throughout the experiment. Cells were harvested for gene and protein expression analysis 24 h and 48 h post infection, respectively. Protein expression levels of IFNβ (A) were measured by ELISA and gene expression levels of IFNβ (D) and viral load (E) were measured by real-time PCR. Data is presented as mean ± standard error of the mean (SEM) fold change of RV16. Comparison of different groups was performed by Kruskal-Wallis with Wilcoxon post testing. #p < 0.05, ##p < 0.01, ###p < 0.001 vs. CTRL; *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001 AZM vs. RV16. Data was obtained from 7 asthmatic and 4 healthy donors. A representative Western Blot image of MDA5 and RIG-I protein is shown (B). Correlation analysis between IFNβ and HRV16 mRNA was performed (C). Correlations were analysed by Spearman. For correlation with a P-value below 0.05, and thus regarded statistically significant, linear regression was employed.