Fig. 1

Differential expression and diagnostic utility of miRNAs in saliva of ASD children. a Hierarchical cluster analysis of the top 14 miRNAs. These miRNAs were differentially expressed in ASD children compared with Controls. Color indicates average Z-score of normalized abundance for each gene. A Euclidian distance metric was used with average cluster linkages for this figure. b Partial Least Squares Discriminant Analysis (PLS-DA) of the top 14 miRNAs showed the general separation of subjects into two clusters, using only three eigenvector components (x, y, and z axes labeled Component 1, Component 2, and Component 3) that collectively accounted for 55 % of the variance of the data set. c ROC-AUC analysis of the training data set indicated a very high level of performance in the logistic regression classification test (100 % sensitivity, 90 % specificity, with an AUC of 0.97)