Fig 1.
Key information about participants, research workflow, and data analysis.
The illustration was drawn by hand using PowerPoint 2021 software.
Table 1.
Basic characteristics of the school aged participants in this study.
Table 2.
List of the top 20 up- and down-regulated proteins.
Fig 2.
Proteomic profiling of urine from Schistosoma haematobium infected volunteers and controls.
(A) Venn diagram illustrating the overlap of identified host proteins between the infection and control groups. (B) Volcano plot depicting changes in protein abundance between the two groups. A total of 269 DEPs (fold change ≥ ±1.5, p < 0.05) were identified. (C) Heatmap showing the expression levels of common proteins across all samples. Red and purple indicate higher and lower protein abundances, respectively, while blue and orange represent the infection (P) and control (N) groups, respectively.
Fig 3.
Bioinformatics analysis of DEPs.
(A) GO analysis displaying the top 10 enriched GO terms across three major categories: biological process, molecular function, and cellular component. (B) GO enrichment analysis and chord diagram. The left side of the diagram lists the gene names of the proteins, with red indicating up-regulation and blue indicating down-regulation. The right side shows the GO terms enriched for these genes. (C) KEGG pathway analysis, highlighting the top 20 significantly enriched pathways. The x-axis represents the rich scores. The y-axis lists the KEGG pathway terms. The size of the dot indicates the number of proteins enriched in the pathway, and the color of the dots represents p-values. (D) Protein-protein interaction network analysis, showing the top 20 proteins ranked by connectivity. Characters represent protein IDs, circles indicate up-regulated proteins, and squares indicate down-regulated proteins.
Fig 4.
The area under the ROC curve (AUC) of cross-validation in each machine learning model.
(A) Bayesian model (bys), (B) logistic regression (LR), (C) decision tree (DT), (D) random forest (RF), (E) support vector machine (SVM), and (F) extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost).
Fig 5.
Validation of the selected DEPs between the control (N) and infection (P) groups by ELISA.
(A) SYNPO2, (B) LCAT, (C) hnRNPM, (D) α2M, (E) CD276 antigen. Data are presented as mean ± SD. *P < 0.05, **P < 0.01.
Fig 6.
Validation of the selected DEPs among the five groups by ELISA.
(A) α2M, (B) LCAT. Data are presented as mean ± SD. Groups are defined as: P, Schistosoma haematobium infected group; N, control group; STH, soil-transmitted helminth infection group; UTI, urinary tract infection group; non-UTI, symptomatic individuals without UTI. The infected group (P) was compared with the other four groups. *P < 0.05, **P < 0.01.
Fig 7.
ROC curves evaluating the diagnostic performance of individual and combined biomarkers.
Curves showing the diagnostic performance of each biomarker and their combination in distinguishing between the five groups: control (N), infection (P), soil-transmitted helminth (STH), urinary tract infection (UTI) and symptomatic individuals without UTI (non-UTI). (A) LCAT, (B) α2M, (C) the combined LCAT and α2M.