Fig. 6: Ciliary motion KO inhibits SARS-CoV-2 spread.

a Snapshots of GFP signal (inverted grayscale) following SARS-CoV-2/eGFP infection of representative knockout cultures at the indicated time points. The bottom panels are temporal color code projections of the entire time course. Scale bar = 1 mm. Representative images are derived from the same 4 cultures. Results were typical across 2 experiments. b Number of GFP+ spots at each timepoint for each culture (n = 5–6 cultures per KO, 3 donors). Bold lines are Loess-smoothed trends with standard error in gray. c First derivative of splines fitted to GFP+ spots count at each frame of videos summarized in (b). Spar = 0.1 for spline fitting. Lines are colored by KO. Bold lines are Loess-smoothed trends with standard error in gray; span = 0.1. d Copies of nucleoprotein RNA per mm² of culture area in mucus collected from all knockout ALI cultures at 5 days post-infection. N = 5–6 cultures from 3 donors (shapes) for each condition. Significance calculated by one-way ANOVA followed by post-hoc analysis using Tukey’s HSD (two-sided) where significant. Black dot and bars show mean ± standard error. e Scatterplot of peak GFP+ spots versus fraction beating area (power density > 2e-4) for all KO cultures. Pearson’s correlation coefficient r = 0.68, p-value = 0.0006. b, c, d, e Points and lines are colored consistently by KO. Source data for all plots are provided as a Source Data file.