Further comparative analysis was performed keeping leptospiral infection as a febrile control to appraise the specificity of the identified malaria related serum markers. Although, some of the identified proteins exhibited similar trends of differential expressions in malaria and febrile controls, interestingly, expression levels of quite a few candidates including serum amyloid A, haptoglobin precursor, ficolin 3 precursor, hemopexin precursor, interleukin-17E precursor, retinol-binding protein, serotransferrin precursor, and vitronectin precursor were found to be altered in malaria patients (both FM and VM) but not in leptospiral infection (Table  S4 ). Altered expression levels of identified serum proteins in falciparum and vivax malaria and leptospirosis (FC) has been illustrated bar-diagrammatically in Figure S4 .