Airway mucus is a heterogeneous mixture of secreted polypeptides, cells, and cellular debris that are present in the airway surface lining fluid subphase or are tethered together at the fluid surface by oligomeric mucin complexes. Mucins are glycoproteins that due to their heavy glycosylation (∼ 75–90% carbohydrate by mass) can exhibit very high molecular weights (in the MDa range; 1) Taken alone, this physical property suggests functional redundancy among mucin family members. However, differences in their localization, glycosylation, and multimeric complex formation imply that individual mucins have evolved to perform specific physiologic roles within the environments in which they are expressed. Mature mucins fall into two broad classes: the membrane-bound mucins and the secreted mucins. Structurally, membrane-bound mucins differ from secreted mucins in several ways. Most prominently, they have transmembrane and cytosolic domains that permit their localization to the plasma membrane surface, where they participate in such functions as cellular adhesion, pathogen binding, and signal transduction (2, 3). Membrane-bound mucins can also be cleaved proteolytically or alternatively spliced, resulting in their release into the extracellular mucous layer; however, the overall contribution of these mucins to the volume and viscosity of the mucous layer remains undefined (4). By contrast, secreted mucins contribute heavily to the viscoelastic properties of the extracellular mucous layer. After synthesis and post-translational processing, these are stored within intracellular secretory granules until stimulated for release by regulated exocytosis (see below and Ref. 5). Most secreted mucins are much larger than the membrane-bound mucins, and these contain cysteine-rich domains located at both the amino and carboxyl termini, most of which are closely related to von Willebrand factor (6, 7). These cysteine-rich domains link covalently as disulfide bonds to form mucin dimers, which are then heavily glycosylated, especially within clustered serine/threonine-rich tandem repeat domains, to from mature mucin dimers. These dimers further multimerize to form the long linear oligomers that provide the adhesive and space occupying properties of the mucous gel layer (8).