Title: A novel prognostic gene set for the prediction of severe dengue

Background There is an urgent need for the identification of biomarkers predictive of severe dengue. Single cohort transcriptomic studies have not yielded a parsimonious gene set predictive of severe dengue. We hypothesized that integration of gene expression data from heterogeneous patient populations with dengue infection would yield a set of conserved genes that is predictive of severe dengue and generalizable across cohorts.