Fig. 3

Differential expression analysis using pairwise multigroup limma. The volcano plots a–d show the results of the same pairwise differential expression analysis between “ALS-Baseline” and “CARL-ALS”. The log2 fold changes (log2FC) are plotted on the x-axis and corresponding adjusted p-values in − log10 scale is shown on the y-axis. The applied adjusted p-value cut-off was set to 0.05 (1.3 in – log10 scale), which is depicted as dashed horizontal line. Each plot highlights significantly up- or downregulated proteins (blue dots) of the respective biological process: a Hemolysis, b Coagulation, c Inflammation, d Cell Death. Hereby, a log2FC > 0 corresponds to an upregulation in the first-mentioned condition. Protein datapoints are labelled with corresponding gene names (black arrows) retrieved from UniProt database (Additional file 4: Table S2)