Fig. 2: Host gene expression and parasitemia.

The volcano plots show the association of host gene expression with the log of the parasitemia before (A) and after (B) adjusting for immune cell composition using a quasi-likelihood negative binomial generalized model. Each point represents one gene, displayed according to its p-value (y-axis) and log fold-change (x-axis). Blue and red points represent genes that were significantly more expressed in low and high parasitemia infections, respectively, corrected for multiple testing using false discovery rate (FDR) (FDR = 0.1). Correlation of the proportion of neutrophils (C) or T cells (D) (y-axis), estimated by gene expression deconvolution, with the log of the parasitemia (x-axis) using linear regression (respectively, Pearson’s R² = 0.05, p = 0.006 and Pearson’s R² = 0.09, p = 0.0004). *DEG = differentially expressed gene. Note that since we measured gene expression correlated with parasitemia as a continuous variable, the log fold-change reflects the change in expression of each gene with each unit of parasitemia, which can be smaller than typical log fold-change values that measure differences in expression between two groups. (N = 136 individuals).