Fig. 3: ACE2 and TMPRSS2 are both regulated by IL-13 in the airway epithelium.

a Experimental schematic detailing the timeline for differentiation of basal airway epithelial cells into a mucociliary airway epithelium and treatment with chronic (10 days) or acute (72 h) IL-13 (10 ng mL⁻¹). b Box plots of count-normalized expression between paired (n = 5 pairs) nasal airway cultures (control/IL-13) revealing strong downregulation of bulk ACE2 expression with IL-13 treatment. Differential expression results are from DESeq2. Benjamini–Hochberg correction was used to control for false discovery rate. c Box plots of count-normalized expression between paired (n = 5 pairs) nasal airway cultures (control/IL-13) revealing strong upregulation of bulk TMPRSS2 expression with IL-13 treatment. Differential expression results are from DESeq2. Benjamini–Hochberg correction was used to control for false discovery rate. d UMAP visualization of 6,969 cells derived from control and IL-13 stimulated tracheal airway ALI cultures depict multiple epithelial cell types identified through unsupervised clustering. e Violin plots of normalized ACE2 expression across epithelial cell types from tracheal airway ALI cultures, stratified by treatment (gray = control, red = IL-13). Differential expression using a two-sided Wilcoxon test was performed between control and IL-13-stimulated cells with significant differences in expression for a cell type indicated by a * (p < 0.05). p-values (left to right) = 0.62; 0.18; 2.8e−4; 0.66; 4.6e−6; 0.08; NA; 0.77; NA; NA; 0.12. f Violin plots of normalized TMPRSS2 expression across epithelial cell types from tracheal airway ALI cultures, stratified by treatment (gray = control, red = IL-13). Differential expression using a two-sided Wilcoxon test was performed between control and IL-13-stimulated cells with significant differences in expression for a cell type indicated by a * (p < 0.05). p-values (left to right) = 9.4e−4; 1.4e−11; 0.51; 2.5e−14; 6.9e−117; 1.5e−38; 2.3e−4; 2.3e−10; 0.46; NA; 0.95. Box centers give the median, upper and lower box bounds correspond to first and third quartiles and the upper/lower whiskers extend from the upper/lower bounds up to/down from the largest/smallest value, no further than 1.5 × IQR from the upper/lower bound (where IQR is the inter-quartile range). Data beyond the end of whiskers are plotted individually.