PI3K Signaling Specifies Proximal-Distal Fate by Driving a Developmental Gene Regulatory Network in Sox9+ Lung Progenitors Divya Khattar 1-3 †, Sharlene Fernandes 2-3 †, John Snowball 2,3 , Minzhe Guo 2,3 , Matthew C. Gillen 1 , Deborah Sinner 2,3,5 , William Zacharias 2-5 , Daniel T. Swarr 1-3,5 * Affiliations: (1) Department of Pediatrics, (2) Perinatal Institute, and (3) Division of Neonatology, Perinatal and Pulmonary Biology, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. (4) Department of Medicine, and (5) Department of Pediatrics, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 45229, USA. † These authors contributed equally to this work. * Address correspondence to: Daniel T. Swarr, MD Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center Division of Neonatology, Perinatal and Pulmonary Biology Department of Pediatrics University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 45229, USA. Phone: 513-803-8396 FAX: 513-636-8724 Email: Daniel.Swarr@cchmc.org . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license available under a (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made The copyright holder for this preprint this version posted February 26, 2021. ; https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.02.26.433053 doi: bioRxiv preprint