Fig. 2

A severe TBI induces protein alterations in CSF and serum. Individual patient proteomic profiles were different in CSF compared with serum, utilizing tSNE. Following a severe TBI, additional proteomic alterations occur within both of these compartments (a). Individual patient attributes, such as BBB disruption, seemed associated with some of TBI patient heterogeneity, predominantly in CSF (b). At the individual protein level, this was mimicked by altered protein levels in both CSF and serum (c, d). Graphical significance threshold was set to log₂ FC |0.5| and adjusted p value < 0.05, and values not fulfilling these criteria were diminished in size and shaded in light-gray. In CSF, both CNS structural and neuroinflammatory protein levels were increased following a severe TBI (c). This was reflected in pathway upregulations of structural, metabolic, and inflammatory pathways (e). In contrast, fewer protein were altered in serum (d), and upregulated pathways were predominantly neuroinflammatory (f). CSF cerebrospinal fluid, TBI traumatic brain injury, tSNE t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding. All full protein names are given in Additional file 3: Table S1