Figure 1.

Functional characterization of the gene expression differences between severity groups and eventual mortality in Quebec COVID-19 patients. Shown are the top 10 enriched pathways/hallmarks for each comparison, direction, and gene set database assessed (i.e., lowest p values). Severity groups were assessed using the respiratory support required at time of sampling with 54 severe, 28 intermediate, and 42 moderate patients. There were 20 patients who died and 100 patients who survived. The severe vs. moderate, severe vs. intermediate, and intermediate vs. moderate, died vs. survived, comparisons yielded 2671 (1794 up, 877 down), 694 (535 up, 159 down), 169 (136 up, 33 down), and 1708 (1006 up, 702 down) DE genes, respectively (displaying ≥  ± 1.5-fold change; adjusted p ≤ 0.05). Age, sex, batch, and time of sampling relative to hospital admission were included in the underlying DESeq2 model to correct for their contribution to gene expression. A post-hoc power analysis (performed with the online tool RnaSeqSampleSize⁵³) using parameters estimated from previous RNA-Seq studies, indicated our study was sufficiently powered (p = 0.8) to detect DE gene differences in gene expression (at least 15% of transcriptome) between patient groups.