About the Authors

Hope T. Jackson

Contributed equally to this work with: Hope T. Jackson, Emmanuel F. Mongodin

Affiliation Sheikh Zayed Institute for Pediatric Surgical Innovation Children's National Medical Center, Washington DC, United States of America

Emmanuel F. Mongodin

Contributed equally to this work with: Hope T. Jackson, Emmanuel F. Mongodin

Affiliation Institute for Genome Sciences, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America

Katherine P. Davenport

Current address: Department of Pediatric Surgery, Rady Children's Hospital San Diego, San Diego, California, United States of America; Department of Surgery, University of California San Diego, San Diego, California, United States of America

Affiliation Sheikh Zayed Institute for Pediatric Surgical Innovation Children's National Medical Center, Washington DC, United States of America

Claire M. Fraser

Affiliation Institute for Genome Sciences, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America

Anthony D. Sandler

Affiliation Department of Pediatric Surgery, and the Sheikh Zayed Institute for Pediatric Surgical Innovation Children's National Medical Center, Washington DC, United States of America

Steven L. Zeichner

zeichner@gwu.edu

Affiliations Center for Cancer and Immunology Research, Children's Research Institute, Children's National Medical Center, Washington DC, United States of America, Departments of Pediatrics and Microbiology, Immunology, and Tropical Medicine George Washington University, Washington DC, United States of America

Competing Interests

The institutions employing the authors of the paper have filed a provisional patent application (Composition and Methods for Diagnosing Appendicitis; US Provisional Patent Application Serial No. 61/938,447) covering the discoveries reported in this manuscript. The institutions have not yet licensed the intellectual property and there are no products currently under development. The institutions employing the authors of the paper have intellectual property policies in place that say that inventors will be given a share of any income the institutions get from the inventions. There are no further patents, products in development or marketed products to declare. This does not alter the authors' adherence to all the PLoS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.

Author Contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: SLZ ADS CMF EFM. Performed the experiments: HTJ EFM KPD. Analyzed the data: HTJ EFM SLZ. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: HTJ KPD. Wrote the paper: HTJ EFM SLZ. Patient interactions and consents: KPD HTJ.