Figure 1

Effect of cigarette smoking and COPD on circulating A1AT’s caspase-3 inhibitory activity. (A) Purity of A1AT eluates obtained by immunopurification from plasma of volunteer subjects, tested via Western blotting (upper panel; representative blot of elutions 1–4 from two subjects) and Coomassie protein staining (lower panel; representative gel of elution 1 from five different subjects). (B) Ex vivo caspase-3 inhibitory activity (% inhibition of caspase-3 activity against a fluorescent substrate; mean + SEM) of A1AT (45.5 µg/mL) purified from the plasma of healthy no-COPD (n = 16) and COPD (n = 13) human volunteers who were either never- or ex-smokers (■, n = 13) or actively smoking cigarettes (■, n = 16).