In the HTML version of this Article, owing to a typesetting error, the affiliations for author Indrabahadur Singh were incorrect. The correct affiliation is ‘Emmy Noether Research Group Epigenetic Machineries and Cancer, Division of Chronic Inflammation and Cancer, German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg, Germany’. The PDF and print versions of the Article are correct. In addition, Ilias Angelidis should have been listed as an author, with the affiliation: ‘Comprehensive Pneumology Center (CPC), Institute of Lung Biology and Disease, Helmholtz Zentrum München, Member of the German Center for Lung Research (DZL), Neuherberg, Germany’. They designed, undertook, and analysed scRNA-seq experiments, and analysed and interpreted data (see ‘Author contributions’). Finally, in the original Article, authors Mathias Heikenwalder and Ali Önder Yildirim were listed as ‘jointly supervising’ authors instead of ‘equally contributing’ authors, alongside authors Thomas M. Conlon and Gerrit John-Schuster. The original Article has been corrected online.