Figure 4.

CATH3 EVs detect DFTD in latent stages. (A) Isolated extracellular vesicles (EVs) from serum samples of 32 devils (15 DFTD latent and 17 healthy wild devils) were analyzed to investigate whether the validated DFTD biomarkers can also serve to predict latent stage DFTD 3 to 6 months before overt DFTD. (B) Volcano plot of protein relative abundance fold changes (log₂) between EVs derived from serum of DFTD latent devils (n=15) and healthy wild controls (n=17) vs fold change significance. (C) Dot plot showing the relative abundance of EV CATH3 and PFN1 detected in 17 wilds healthy, 15 latent, and 33 DFTD-infected devils, different letters “a” and “b” indicate significant pairwise differences between groups (i.e., groups denoted with the same letter are not significantly different; one-way ANOVA and Tukey post-hoc test, p < 0.05). (D) Receiver operating curve analysis performed to classify latent devils (n=15) from healthy controls (n=17). Sensitivity and specificity were calculated (95% confidence intervals) for latent devils based on the protein threshold trained with the full validation dataset (n=50).