A plasma proteomic approach in patients with heart failure after acute myocardial infarction: insights into the pathogenesis and progression of the disease

Figure 1. Details of the all the protein spectrums obtained from the proteins in the blood samples of the MI-WHF and MI-HF patients in this study. The matched spectrums refers to the number of effective spectrographs that matched the theoretical secondary spectrums obtained. The peptides refers to the number of identified peptides by matching the sequences. The unique peptides are the number of identified unique peptides after matching. The identified proteins refer to the number of identified proteins that were resolved and the quantifiable proteins are those that were quantified by using their specific peptides.

Figure 2. Differential protein identification. DEPs volcano showed there are 51 upregulated and 66 downregulated genes when the MI-HF and MI-WHF patient groups were compared. The green and red dots represent the downregulated and upregulated genes, respectively and the gray dots represent no change. The most differentially expressed proteins are clearly marked.

Figure 3. (A) the COG/KOG and (B) subcellular-based annotation and classification of the DEPs in terms of cellular process, information storage and processing, metabolism and poorly characterized proteins.

Figure 4. GO-based enrichment analysis of DEPs in terms of biological process, cellular component and molecular function.

Figure 5. (A,B) functional enrichment of DEPs. Bubble plots were used to show the top 20 significantly enriched DEPs. The vertical axes are their functional classification or pathway and the horizontal axes are the Log2-transformed values for the proportion of DEPs in this functional type fold- enrichment over the proportion of the identified proteins. The color and size of the circles indicate the enrichment significance P-value and number of DEPs in their functional classes or pathways.

Figure 6. The functional enrichment clusters associated with the DEPS. A heatmap of the Fisher's exact test P-values from the enrichment analysis was drawn for the correlation functions in the MI-HF and MI-WHF patient groups by their fold-difference using hierarchical clustering. The Q1 and Q2 groups were the differential fold downregulated groups, where Q1 was the markedly enriched and Q2 was the generally enriched pathway downregulated. Groups Q3 and Q4 referred to the upregulation groups, respectively. The horizontal section of the heatmap is for the different fold groups, and the longitudinal section shows the description of the related functions of DEPs enriched these groups by the KEGG pathway analysis. Red and blue represent strong and weak enrichment of the different comparative DEPs groups, respectively.

Figure 7. Protein–protein interaction (PPI) network analysis of DEPs. The STRING database was used to annotate the functional interactions of all the identified DEPs. The circles represent different proteins and the colors represent the differential expression of the proteins (green and red refer to downregulated and upregulated proteins, respectively), and the darker the color, the greater the difference. In order to clearly show the interaction relationship between proteins, we screened the top 49 closest interacting proteins in order to map the protein interaction network, presenting a global view of their diverse cellular functions. These DEPs were involved in acute myeloid leukemia and the NF−kappa B signaling pathway.