Fig. 5.

Functional characterization of differentially expressed mRNAs derived from serum exosomes of septic patients with Metascape. (A-C) Interaction networks of the enriched biological terms for the dysregulated mRNAs in serum exosomes from patients with sepsis (A), severe sepsis (B) and septic shock (C). Metascape enrichment networks for dysregulated mRNAs in exosomes were constructed by selecting each enriched term as a node and connecting the pairs of nodes with κ similarities > 0.3 to form a cluster with Cytoscape. Each node was colored by its cluster ID, and nodes that shared the same pathway were typically close to each other. (D) Interaction networks of proteins encoded by differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in serum exosomes from patients with sepsis at different stages. The networks were constructed with Metascape, and the modules of core genes from the PPI networks were filtered by MCODE in Cytoscape. The colored circles represent MCODE proteins encoded by DEGs of serum exosomes from patients with sepsis at different stages. The gray circles represent proteins encoded by DEGs of serum exosomes that were not detected by MCODE.