Fig. 1

Identification of 15 key proteins differentiating MIS-C from SCNS patients. (A) Volcano plot demonstrating the log2 change in biomarkers between patients with MIS-C and SCNS. The top 15 biomarkers (P < 0.0001; FDR adjusted P value < 0.05) are highlighted, with those coloured green demonstrating an increase in protein expression in MIS-C patients compared with SCNS patients, while those in red demonstrate a decrease in MIS-C protein expression relative to SCNS patients. (B) Subjects plotted in two dimensions, following t-SNE dimensionality reduction of the top 15 proteins, showed cluster separation of MIS-C patients and SCNS patients on Day 1. (C) A heatmap demonstrating the pairwise cosine similarity between the participants’ top 15 protein profiles. A greater cosine similarity measure between subjects indicated similar protein profiles, whereas a smaller measure indicated large differences between profiles (the measure was pseudocolored on the bar scale). The protein profile of MIS-C patients was distinctively different from that of SCNS Day 1 patients, with some homogeneity across the different days.