Our large cohorts allowed us to statistically validate the patternbased proteome definitions of the major childhood malaria syndromes. Although the mass spectrometry platform used in our study does not provide direct molecular identification, the chromatographic chemistry used and the mass-to-charge (m/z) ratio can be exploited to guide the identification of the set of proteins relevant for discrimination between syndromes. Plasma proteome profiling has been used to define a variety of disease states [16, [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] as there is growing recognition of the advantages of using 'omics'-based methods to achieve sufficient levels of accuracy [24] . Our study showed that complex plasma protein patterns were necessary to discriminate between the different malaria syndromes. This further underlines the advantage of using unbiased high-throughput pattern recognition based methods.