Unique intrahepatic transcriptomics profiles discriminate the clinical phases of a chronic HBV infection
Fig 1
Schematic presentation of patient selection.
(A) Total RNA from liver samples of 94 chronic HBV patients were examined by DASL microarray in 2 batches. A quality-based selection excluded 20 arrays from further analysis. Based on HBV DNA and ALT levels, 52 out of 74 cases were further selected as the core cohort, which have a well-defined clinical HBV phase, and a fibrosis grade of 2 or less, and no evidence of NASH or other complications. Significance Analysis of Microarray, K-means pattern analysis, and modular repertoire analysis were performed to get expression signatures of chronic HBV clinical phases. For validating the expression profiling, NanoString was employed to studied the expression of immune genes in an independent liver FFPE cohort and immunohistochemical staining was applied on 38 paired FFPE samples to evaluating the functional status of altered gene expression. (B) Baseline characteristics of chronic HBV patients divided into four clinical phases based on HBV-DNA and ALT levels. ULN: upper limit of normal (40 U/L).