Fig. 1: Sex differences in the abundance of 5823 unique proteins measured by 4979 unique aptamers and 2923 unique antibody assays.

Linear regression models were used to test the association of sex with the protein abundance in each cohort. The protein targets were ordered by their effect size in males. Top panel: The top panel shows the proteins for which the plasma abundance significantly differed by sex in at least one technology (p_het < 1.01 × 10⁻⁵ for aptamer-based and p_het < 1.71 × 10⁻⁵ for antibody-based technology were used as Bonferroni-corrected thresholds respectively). The proteins were coloured blue if they had significantly higher levels in males and red if they had higher levels in females. If the protein target was significant in both of the technologies, the effect size estimate from the more significant study was displayed. The dark grey vertical lines represent the 95% confidence intervals for the effect size estimates. Bottom panel: The bars in the bottom panel represent the proteins which were targeted by both aptamer-based and antibody-based platforms. The lines were coloured lighter green if the finding was significant and directionally consistent in both technologies, yellow if the finding was significant but not directionally consistent across technologies, lilac if the finding was only significant in one of the technologies and black if the finding was not significant in any of the technologies. Results can be found in Supplementary Data 2.