Fig. 1

Up-regulation of genes functional in NETosis in the blood of patients with COVID-19. (A) For the gene set functional in NETosis, pathway score (red vertical line) was calculated by weighted averaging of t-statistic between control group (10 healthy subjects, single time point) and COVID-19 group (3 cases, multiple time-points). The histogram (gray bars) represents the null distribution of the pathway score calculated for each of the 10,000 iterations of permuting the sample labels. The position of the red vertical line (observed pathway score) with respect to the histogram (null distribution) suggests that the pathway is significantly up-regulated in the blood of COVID-19 patients. As shown, there is significant (p = 0.04) up-regulation of the gene set functional in NETosis. (B) Calculation of the pathway score and the null-distribution of the cytokine gene set has been performed as mentioned for NETosis. As shown, there is no (p = 1) up-regulation of cytokine gene set in COVID-19. (C) For validation of NETosis, gene expression data of healthy control (n = 6) and COVID-19 (n = 7) were extracted from an independent cohort [14]. Box plot shows up-regulation of NETosis genes in COVID-19 cases compared to the control group. Gene expression data were extracted from the data set E-MTAB-8871 [13] for panels A and B; and from the data set GSE150728 [14] for panel C