The human host response to monkeypox infection: a proteomic case series study (2022)
Figure 2

Figure 2. Differences and similarities between the plasma proteome upon infection with MPXV and SARS-CoV-2.

a) Heatmap displaying hierarchical clustering using differentially regulated proteins between patients with MPX, COVID-19, and controls.

b) Scatterplot of log fold-change (logFC) for contrast MPX vs control (C1, x-axis) and logFC for contrast COVID-19 vs control (C2, y- axis). Only the central part of the cloud is shown here. Three truncated dots (APOC1, CRP, and SAA1) are shown in the lower left and upper right corner. A full-scale figure is presented in FigureEV 4a). Differentially abundant (Regulated; 'Reg') proteins are color coded, with the red color corresponding to 37 proteins differentially abundant in both MPX vs control (C1) and COVID-19 vs control (C2), the orange color corresponding to proteins specifically changed in MPX vs control (C1) only (16 proteins), and the green color corresponding to proteins responding to both MPX vs control (C1) and MPX vs COVID-19 (C3) (3 proteins). There are no intersections between COVID-19 vs control (C2) and MPX vs COVID-19 (C3). The blue color corresponds to proteins responding to MPX vs COVID-19 (C3), but not in MPX vs control (C1) (11 proteins), and the pink color to proteins responding to COVID-19 vs control (C2) only (19 proteins). The red dotted line shows a linear regression through the red dots, i.e. proteins differentially abundant in MPX vs control (C1) and COVID-19 vs control (C2). Note that orange and pink points have the same direction of regulation in both MPXV vs control (C1) and COVID-19 vs control (C2). Only green and blue dots (except three proteins: ADIPOQ, GPLD1, and IGHV1-2) have opposite directions in C1 and in C2.

c) Post hoc PCA score plot using proteins shown in (a).

d) Differentially regulated proteins of patients with MPX and COVID-19 (Volcano Plot); α <= 0.015 and |logFC| >= 1.35 were used for selection of regulated proteins. The chosen significance level ensured that fdr for this contrast was below 22%.

e) Key proteins that differ between patients with MPX and COVID-19 (Boxplots) (p-values and fdr for corresponding contrast MPX vs COVID-19 are provided in brackets): LCP1 (p-value = 3E-4, fdr = 3E-2), LDHB (p-value = 2E-3, fdr = 6E-2), CFHR1 (p-value = 2E-4, fdr = 3E-2). Here the central bar marks the median (second quartile), the bottom edge of the box marks the first quartile, the top edge of the box marks the third quartile, and the bottom and top whiskers mark the minimum and maximum values that are not outliers. The specific values of the protein expressions are also shown. Provided p-values are obtained from moderated statistics implemented in limma, dfrs were calculated according to Benjamini-Hochberg.

f) Top 8 proteins of an SVM-trained model discriminating between healthy controls (n=15) and MPX cases (n=6) (top) or COVID-19 (n=10) and MPX (n=6) cases (bottom). Means of the relative coefficients over a 5-fold cross-validation are shown. Error bars denote the standard deviations. Red denotes positive, blue denotes negative coefficients. The AUC was calculated based on withheld samples that were not used for training the model.