Fig. 1

Differential host responses in patients with IE compared to patients with AE. A The principal coordinate analysis plot showing the grouping of samples from the two groups based on global gene expression profiles. B The volcano plot of DEGs. The significant DEGs are highlighted in red (upregulated genes in IE) or green (down-regulated genes in IE). The unsignificant DEGs are marked in grey. The top 5 distinctly expressed genes are labeled. C The heatmap of differential expression of the top 15 significantly upregulated and downregulated genes across all the samples. The genes are ranked by P value. The color scale shows different values of log₂(TPM + 1) which indicates different gene expression levels. The red of the top group bar indicates samples from group IE and the cyan indicates group AE. D Gene functional enrichment analysis of DEGs. The heatmap indicates the top 20 representative enriched GO terms. E The heatmap showed the enriched GO terms associated with synapse. The color scale indicates the value of − log₁₀P