About the Authors

Jyh-Chang Jean

Contributed equally to this work with: Jyh-Chang Jean, Elizabeth George

Affiliation The Pulmonary Center, Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America

Elizabeth George

Contributed equally to this work with: Jyh-Chang Jean, Elizabeth George

Affiliations The Pulmonary Center, Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America, College of Engineering, Bioinformatics Program, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America

Klaus H. Kaestner

Affiliation Department of Genetics, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America

Lou Ann Scism Brown

Affiliation Department of Pediatrics, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America

Avrum Spira

Affiliations The Pulmonary Center, Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America, College of Engineering, Bioinformatics Program, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America, Section of Computational Biomedicine, Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America

Martin Joyce-Brady

mjbrady@bu.edu

Affiliation The Pulmonary Center, Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America

Competing Interests

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Author Contributions

JCJ and EG contributed equally to this work. Conceived and designed the experiments: JCJ MJB. Performed the experiments: JCJ EG LASB MJB. Analyzed the data: JCJ EG LASB AS MJB. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: KHK LASB. Wrote the paper: MJB.