APOC3 and infection: After synthesizing the results, including fold change and bioinformatics data, as well as considering the biological functions of these differentially expressed proteins associated with infection and immunity, 4 up-regulated proteins (ACT, AGP1, CFH, and CP) and 4 down-regulated proteins (CDH1, APOCIII, RBP4, and TF) were selected to be validated by western blotting, using the pooled samples in the discovery set (Figure 3).