Nickel-induced transcriptional memory in lung epithelial cells promotes interferon signaling upon nicotine exposure

In the December 2023 issue of Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology, Zhang et al. used the R package, ReactomePA (Yu and He, 2016), to identify enriched pathways responding to nickel-induced transcriptional memory changes in response to a second respiratory toxicant, nicotine. Nicotine exposure upregulated a specific subset of genes in the cells previously exposed to nickel, identifying a robust activation of Interferon (IFN) signaling, a driver of inflammation associated with many chronic lung diseases.