About the Authors

Huaiqing Chen

Contributed equally to this work with: Huaiqing Chen, Yueyun Ma

Affiliation Center for Immunology and Microbial Disease, Albany Medical College, Albany, New York, United States of America

Yueyun Ma

Contributed equally to this work with: Huaiqing Chen, Yueyun Ma

Affiliations Center for Immunology and Microbial Disease, Albany Medical College, Albany, New York, United States of America, Center for Clinical Molecular Biology, Xijing Hospital, Fourth Military Medical University, Xi'an, China

Jun Yang

Affiliation Center for Immunology and Microbial Disease, Albany Medical College, Albany, New York, United States of America

Christopher J. O'Brien

Affiliation Center for Immunology and Microbial Disease, Albany Medical College, Albany, New York, United States of America

Scott L. Lee

Affiliation Division of Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery, Albany Medical College, Albany, New York, United States of America

Joseph E. Mazurkiewicz

Affiliation Center for Neuropharmacology and Neuroscience, Albany Medical College, Albany, New York, United States of America

Sauli Haataja

Affiliation Department of Medical Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Turku, Turku, Finland

Jing-Hua Yan

Affiliation Center for Molecular Immunology, Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

George F. Gao

Affiliation Center for Molecular Immunology, Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

Jing-Ren Zhang

zhangj@mail.amc.edu

Affiliation Center for Immunology and Microbial Disease, Albany Medical College, Albany, New York, United States of America

Competing Interests

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Author Contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: HC YM SL JRZ. Performed the experiments: HC YM JY CO SL JM JRZ. Analyzed the data: HC YM GG JRZ. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: YM JY CO SL JM SH JHY GG JRZ. Wrote the paper: HC YM SH JRZ.