Figure 7. Reduced transcriptional signature of scrub typhus.

The microarrays performed on RNA isolated from healthy controls or patients with infectious diseases suggested that five genes can be used as a specific signature of scrub typhus. A. The unsupervised hierarchical clustering of 22 patients and 2 pools of RNA from healthy controls was performed based on the expression of these five genes. The normalized expression level in each sample was baseline-adjusted to the mean expression level of the healthy control group and color-scaled, with red indicating increased expression and blue indicating decreased expression. B. The expression of the five genes was assessed using qRT-PCR. The results, expressed as the log₂ ratio of fold changes, are presented as the mean ± SEM of all the patients in each group performed in duplicate.