Fig. 2

Voluntary wheel running enhances lung aeration in TNF-Tg mice without change in tissue volume. A representative cross-sectional image of a lung micro-CT dataset is provided for all groups of TNF-Tg female mice at 5.5 months of age (A.a–D.a) with associated segmentations of aerated (yellow) and tissue (blue) regions of the lung (A.b–D.b). Aerated volumes showed a significant dependence on activity and were increased for both females (E.a) and males (E.b), while tissue volumes were unaffected by activity (F.a, F.b). The increased aerated volume with activity similarly led to increased total lung volumes (G.a, G.b). Representative H&E-stained lung images from sedentary and running TNF-Tg females are provided, which demonstrates the relative increase in the proportion of aerated (white) to tissue (pink/purple) lung area for running TNF-Tg females with localized reductions in cellular infiltrate adjacent to arterioles (black arrows, H.a–I.b). Statistics: 3-way mixed-effects (E.a–G.a) and 2-way ANOVA (E.b–G.b); *p<0.05, ***p<0.001, ****p<0.0001. Black scale bar = 500μm (H, I.a), yellow scale bar = 100μm (H, I.b)