genes that are declared DE in the meta-analysis

Question

[Edalat]

hello all,

I did meta-analysis for some RNA-seq data,after meta-analysis I find genes that are declared DE in the meta-analysis but were not identifieded in any of the individual studies alone. Are these genes valuable?

in addition the number of genes that are identifieded DE in individual studies but not in meta-analysis.I think these genes are not valuable,is it true?

[aka001]

I would say your question is quite broad and very context dependent. There are always possibilities to have genes that are differentially expressed in some cases but not in other cases. And we couldn't directly say that those genes are not valuable without further investigation, e.g. GO analysis, validation, etc.

[mforde84]

There's a lot of reasons why this might be the case. Maybe you just have more inferential power with the additional samples. Maybe you didn't correct for batch effects. etc.