Fig. 5: RIG-I and MDA5 knockout diminish the IR-induced cellular immune response.

a Spearman’s correlation analysis of the expression of RIG-I and MDA5 with that of representative genes related to the immune response (OAS2, HLA-B, IFNB1, CD274, CCL5 and CXCL10) in TCGA lung adenocarcinoma sample sets (Firehose Legacy, n = 584). b Expression dynamics of DDX58 (RIG-I) and immune response markers in nonirradiated (NIR) A549 cells and irradiated (IR) cells exposed to 8 Gy radiation. c Expression of representative immune-active markers in wild-type (WT), RIG-I knockout (KO), MDA5-KO and MAVS-KO cells. Error bars represent the SEM of three biological replicates. *p ≤ 0.05 compared to the IR_WT group, Student’s t-test. d Quantification of ISRE activity in WT and KO A549 cells after radiotherapy (RT). Error bars represent the SEM of three biological replicates. *p ≤ 0.05, Student’s t-test. e Expression of representative immune-active genes in NIR WT cells and in IR WT and KO cell lines. The Z-score was calculated using the R package pheatmap from the TPM of the indicated TEs, and then clustering was performed using the same package.