Fig. 2

Gene set clusters of the early pre-acute (left) and late post-acute phase (right). a The cluster of the early pre-acute phase consisted of 16 gene sets being upregulated in female patients. They comprised seven gene sets of the innate immune response. These gene sets are shown here. The complete list is given in Additional file 1: Fig. S5. b For the same phase, in comparison to healthy controls, leukocytes of both sexes showed a higher expression of genes for the innate immune response. A distinctively higher expression was observed in female patients. c Gene set clusters of the late post-acute phase consisted of 17 gene sets being upregulated in female patients, nine were related to the adaptive immune response. These gene sets are shown here. The complete list is given in Additional file 1: Fig. S12. d For the same phase, in comparison to healthy controls, leukocytes of female patients showed upregulation of the adaptive immune response. These gene sets were similarly expressed in male patients and healthy controls. The z-transformed expression values were referred to as ‘scaled expression’ values. Significance of difference between the expression of genes of male and female individuals was tested using two-sided Student’s t-tests (* P < 0.05, mean bar and Whiskers of the boxplots: mean ± se)