Figure 3.

Cell-free (cf)-mRNA profile shows distinct profile for patients with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) compared with control subjects. A: volcano plot depicting the cf-mRNA genes that are differentially expressed between patients with NAFLD and healthy controls (n = 176 and 23, respectively, n = number of subjects). Significantly dysregulated genes are denoted in red, false discovery rate (FDR) < 0.05 was used as the cutoff criterion. B: most significant biological pathways identified using upregulated (top) and downregulated genes (bottom) identified in A as inputs (Gene Ontology). C: heat map showing nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) gene clusters within patients with NAFLD. D: top Gene Ontology biological process categories associated with each cluster.