Understanding Human Cerebral Malaria through a Blood Transcriptomic Signature: Evidences for Erythrocyte Alteration, Immune/Inflammatory Dysregulation, and Brain Dysfunction

Figure 1

(a) Heatmap for differentially expressed genes between cerebral malaria (CM) and uncomplicated malaria (UM) children. Hierarchical clustering of microarrays was obtained using Pearson’s correlation on probes with a fold change greater than two and adjusted value ≤ 0.01. The red color represents high expression, while the green color represents low expression. The blue and purple bars at the top represent the CM and UM children, respectively. Some interesting candidate genes are indicated, in red for the new players of CM pathophysiology, in black for the genes previously described in malaria. (b) Stacked bar chart displaying the top canonical pathways found to be differentially represented in comparing gene expression in CM and UM children absolute fold change ≥2, adjusted value ≤ 0.05. The total number of genes in each pathway is displayed above each bar. Pathways are ranked by statistical significance; the orange dot indicate the -log ( value). The percentage of dysregulated genes is indicated for each pathway, downregulated genes are in green, and the upregulated genes are in red. The ratio of the numbers of DEGs to the total number of genes in the pathways ranged from 9% to 100%.

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