The expression analysis of the genes mapping to the region 8p23.1 associated with sepsis revealed that besides MFHAS1 and CLDN23, many of the top-most significant differential expression (q-value <0.001) between sepsis cases and controls were concentrated in defensin genes (DEFA4 was the top ranked) (Supplementary Table 5). Here, CLDN23 is linked to Sepsis.