Fig. 5.

ddRT-PCR validation of selected mRNA biomarkers in an expanded cohort. Patient samples from the discovery and validation sets were expanded to include an additional set of appendicitis and abdominal pain patients drawn from the same cohort. Panel a ALPL, DEFA, IL8RB mRNA was quantitated by ddRT-PCR and then expressed as percent of the ACTB value from each subject. Mean and SEM are shown for patients with non-appendicitis abdominal pain (ABDOM, n = 30) versus confirmed appendicitis (APPENDIX, n = 30). Panel b The same biomarkers are shown for ABDOM (n = 30) versus suspected lung infections (LUNG, n = 5). In both panels, * indicates p < 0.05, **indicates p < 0.005