Fig. 3: Longitudinal stability of plasma proteome.

a Scatter plots of coefficient of variation (CV) versus mean of normalized protein expression (NPX) over 10 timepoints in n = 6 participants. One plasma sample per week was collected from n = 6 participants over 10 weeks. The evaluation for each participant was based on measurements on 1042 proteins in the corresponding 10 plasma samples. The longitudinal stable and variable proteins are represented in blue and red, respectively. b, c Heatmap of CV of top 50 longitudinally variable (b CV > 5%) or stable (c CV < 5%) plasma proteins. d Top panel: Number of proteins with \(z > 2.5\) (red) or \(z < -2.5\) (blue) in individual samples, where \(z=({NPX}-\overline{{NPX}})/{SD}\) with \(\overline{{NPX}}\) and \({SD}\) being the mean and the standard deviation, respectively, of \({NPX}\) across samples of the same participant. Bottom panel: \(-{\log }_{10}({p})\) for individual samples being possible outliers, where \({p}\) is calculated based on a binomial test (two-sided). e Protein examples clearly demonstrate that Week 6 of participant PTID3 was an outlier. b, c, e Each boxplot displays the median (centerline), the first and third quartiles (the lower and upper bound of the box), and the 1.5x interquartile range (whiskers) of the data. Adobe Illustrator (version 27.1.1; https://www.adobe.com/products/illustrator.html) was used to arrange panels and edit text. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.