Fig. 3: Viral RNA expression is associated with decreased ISG and increased heat shock protein expression.

a Pathway analysis (i) of differentially regulated genes in HCMV-NG exposed versus mock-treated (1st panel), (ii) of productively infected versus bystander moDCs (2nd panel), and (iii) correlation of host genes with viral RNA expression in bystander (3rd panel) and (iv) in productively infected moDCs (4th panel). Shown are all MSigDB Hallmark pathways in which at least one analysis was statistically significant (highlighted in color, p < 0.01, two-sided Wilcoxon test, Benjamini-Hochberg multiple testing correction). Each vertical line is the rank of the fold change (1st and 2nd panel) or of the Spearman correlation (3rd and 4th panel) for a pathway gene. Ranks are divided by the total number of genes in a manner that rank 0 represents the value of the most down-regulated (1st and 2nd panel) or negatively correlated genes (3rd and 4th panel), whereas rank 1 represents the most up-regulated (1st and 2nd panel) or positively correlated (3rd and 4th panel) gene. Colors represent kernel density estimates of ranks with the mode of the density scaled to 1. b Spearman’s correlation coefficients between total viral RNA expression and expression of individual host genes across bystander cells (B, y-axis) and productively infected cells (P, x-axis). Dots are colored depending on their expression level in P relative to B (FC, fold change) revealing more down- (blue, n = 94) than upregulated (red, n = 29) genes (Wilcoxon test, false discovery rate < 0.01, absolute log₂ fold change >0.5). c Protein-protein interaction network derived from the functional enrichment analysis provided by the STRING database. The data shows the 16 most positively correlated genes in HCMV-NG exposed clusters (highlighted in red). Connections represent predicted functional evidence for protein-protein interactions.