Fig. 4

Spearman’s correlation analysis between the expression levels of all the mRNAs and miRNAs tested in plaque material. Spearman’s rank are reported for each correlation. Values in bold are different from 0 with a significance level alpha = 0.05. Orange and green boxes highlight positive and negative correlation, respectively (a). Heat map of hierarchical clustering of gene expression in plaque material from each patients. The columns indicate patient numbers and the rows indicate the analysed genes. Upregulated genes are shown in red and downregulated genes are shown in blue. The intensity of color is proportional to the relative mRNA and miR levels of transcription (b)